Mysterium is the eighth album from Nashville’s ambient guitar duo, Hammock. While each of the group’s albums has been defined by a specific sound—minimal and uncluttered on Maybe They Will Sing for Us Tomorrow, and nearly approaching conventional dreampop on Chasing After Shadows…Living with the Ghosts—on Mysterium, the band’s members Marc Byrd and Andrew Thompson are just as focused on thematic unity in their lyrics. Grief and tension abound on Mysterium and, unlike the band’s previous offering, Everything and Nothing, the song structures and arrangements feel a little less straightforward. Instead, the new record plays like a requiem in both its tone and its sweeping scope.
That change is intentional. The album is dedicated to Marc Byrd’s sister, whose son died in 2016 from NF2, an aggressive tumor. Because facing tremendous loss can evoke silence, the album’s title, Mysterium, indicates the lack of resolution—a mystery. The album was created both in the midst of, and as a response to, Byrd’s grief; it’s in no hurry to arrive at any kind of well-meaning platitudes. “Silence is reverence, and space is reverence,” Byrd says. “And if there’s nothing else, there’s a sense of reverence in this record for life and death. The thing that captures that reverence is the moments between the notes.”
That’s not necessarily what the band envisioned when they started recording. Initially, they intended to make an electronic album that Byrd describes as “more in the vein of [debut album] Kenotic.” With the assistance of Matt Kidd (whose own project, Slow Meadow, records for Hammock Music), ambient electronic sounds open “Things of Beauty Burn,” the first song Byrd and Thompson recorded for Mysterium. But after the passing of Byrd’s nephew, the band felt it was inappropriate to continue in the same direction.
The Fat Angel Sings 