Amina Hocine: Sound Crystals and Siren Songs

The Swedish composer builds DIY valve organs from simple hardware store materials

A couple of years ago, Amina Hocine spent some time at an artist residency in an old iron mine in Central Sweden. Enchanted by the sound of the passing trains’ horns, the composer conceived of an idea to create her very own musical instrument.

The “foghorn organ”, which she often just refers to as “the instrument”, consists of PVC pipes, water hoses, ball valves and some 3D-printed elements; it’s powered by a construction site air compressor.

On this self-constructed organ, Amina creates haunting, minimal soundscapes informed by deep listening, spiritual sciences and psychological self-inquiry.

Her new album ātamōn is released on James Ginzburg’s Subtext label, accompanied by a book in cooperation with British music and culture writer Jennifer Lucy Allan; it contains two longform pieces which showcase the instrument’s ritualistic drones, which Amina calls “sound crystals”.

Amina has a degree in electroacoustic composition at Stockholm’s Royal College of Music, and has been working across film, theatre, installations and other commissions.

We spoke about her formative years in Gothenburg, being inspired by the sound of sirens, and her idiosyncratic approach to drone music.

photo: Ekaterina Lukoshkova

Amina, what are some of your earliest memories of sound?

One memory that has been very shaping is the war alarm sound that they test four times a year. In Sweden, it's not the siren that goes up and down; it’s a straight tone, but when it's spread around town, it creates chords. I was at kindergarten, so I was sitting in one of those double-tyre swings, and I remember hearing this alarm. I was alone, stuck in the swing, and had to surrender to the sound. I don't think of it as something scary. I guess I was a bit scared at the time, but it felt as if I woke up like – okay, something's happening.

What kind of music did your parents play at home?

My mother's a pianist. She didn't listen a lot to music because she was playing all the time, mostly classical music. She used to rehearse with opera singers, and she was also a piano teacher, so I heard all of her students playing more or less good. It was a very comforting sound to me. And every Easter, we used to listen to Jesus Christ Superstar on vinyl, and maybe some Pink Floyd and Ralph Lundsten, the Swedish electronic music pioneer.

Did your mother want you to play piano as well?

No, I wanted to play piano – she was more reluctant. When I started playing piano, she made me start playing violin as well, because she wanted me to play a social instrument, as she found the piano too introverted. But she was my piano teacher for the first few years, and then I had someone else teaching me.

When did you start getting into listening to music and seeking it out actively?

I remember it vividly. I have two memories. Firstly, I was watching a lot of MTV growing up, I was maybe six when I saw the video for “Spaceman” by Babylon Zoo. I found it amazing and just stayed in front of the television, waiting for it to happen again, because I didn't know how to seek it out. My first CD was Army Of Lovers. They were playing on MTV all day back in the mid-90s. Do you know them?

Sure, they were this Swedish dance pop group. They were quite successful in Germany as well.

It was only because the CD had a nice cover and we just bought a CD player so I could listen to something. Later, when I was a teenager, my friends and I used to send each other music on MSN.

That would have been in the 2000s?

Yeah, I was born in ‘91. As a tween, I was listening to a lot of Linkin Park and Evanescence. My mother had an Enya album, and she’s still my hero. Those were the early years but then later, my big five were Aphex Twin, Massive Attack, Philip Glass, Rachmaninov and Michael Nyman.

It’s so interesting how perceptions change. Bands like Linkin Park or Evanescence, or even an artist like Enya – if a composer like you had mentioned them in an interview just a decade ago, many would have frowned. Maybe some still do.

I like things that make people frown. That's where it gets interesting. What’s beautiful and what’s not, what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s high and what’s low culture? These are just labels and ideas. I think there’s excellence in every genre. I love all types of music.

When did you actually start getting into electroacoustic composition?

That's a tricky one. When I was 13, I was making these little experiments. I had a micro tape recorder, and I used to record my songs on piano, then I took it to our crappy laptop, recorded with the crappy microphone from the crappy speaker, and then from that speaker back to the micro tape recorder, so I made a loop that just destroyed the sound, and for some reason, I found that really interesting.

But then I went more into electronic pop, and for some reason I didn't really come in contact with experimental or electroacoustic music for a long time. I applied for a Bachelor in composition when I was 25, just because a friend told me about it, and a whole world opened up to me. So I’d been doing similar stuff for a long time already, but I didn’t know that it was an actual thing.

Your album ātamōn could be categorized as drone music, which has become quite fashionable over the last five to 10 years, especially with all the young composers coming from Sweden. Were you inspired by that scene around labels like Ideologic Organ and XKatedral too?

No, I had hardly listened to any drone music before. The inspiration to make that music was really just the instrument. I built it myself, tried it out, and then the music told me where it wanted to go. I asked the instrument: How do you want me to play you? Because it’s played with valves, it's not a keyboard, so you can't play it quickly. You could, but then you’d get a more chaotic texture that I'm not interested in. Really small movements in opening the valve make a huge difference. These changes need to go slowly, and that's what I find interesting.

photo: Ekaterina Lukoshkova

You mentioned you started out making electronic pop music, but then studied electroacoustic composition at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm. Why did you choose that path?

Well, in 2017 I was really tired when it came to pop music and what that means as a performer and a person, especially as a woman. I was tired of performing this character. I was going through a musical crisis and felt like I needed to break free. I just wasn’t where I wanted to be. I was doing my instrumental experiments that I didn't release, and a friend of mine told me about this program. She was like, “This would be perfect for you, this is exactly where you need to be.” And she was right. I got some time to explore a route I've been wanting to explore; it's just been hard because in Gothenburg, I was kind of put in a folder. I needed some fresh air.

I know the city a bit. It’s beautiful, but rather small. I imagine it would feel like a village after a while.

It really is. I always say, the neighborhood where I grew up, if you walk down the big street there, it's like going on Facebook, right? (laughs) But I love Gothenburg. If I wasn't from the city, I’d say it’s perfect. It has a lot of culture. I find it really beautiful. I really miss the ocean here in Stockholm. People are really nice and open there… well, that's an exaggeration, but they're more open than here. And it's easy to get around because it's so small. But it also feels really small when you've lived there for a while.

When you started studying composition, which composers inspired you, and what did you learn from them?

Éliane Radigue and Pauline Oliveros are the two key figures. It might sound strange, but when I was studying, I was actually trying to limit my exposure to other music. I wanted to be in my own zone, my own space, and not get too affected or disturbed. That can happen by listening, or by collaborations as well. But Pauline, of course, she really put words to stuff. She taught me to hear in a whole other way.

I actually went to the ear doctor one time, because I've always thought that my hearing is a bit destroyed, but they did a test on me and told me I have excellent hearing. I'm not saying this to brag; I think that it is my ear training. I really notice that my hearing has gotten a lot better in terms of recognizing sound and frequencies.

Éliane Radigue and Pauline Oliveros weren’t appreciated as much as they should have been for a long time, but their reappraisal has been going on for a while now. Where do you think that comes from?

I think as things are moving faster, as we are getting more and more overstimulated every day, a lot of people feel the need to slow down, but it needs to be kind of forced upon you. Maybe that is the reason that we can now find a real appreciation for what they did. This started before COVID, so I don't think it's only because of the pandemic, but maybe it had something to do with it.

Let’s talk about your instrument, the valve organ you built out of PVC pipes. Are you a handy person in general, someone that builds and repairs stuff at home?

Yeah. I never thought of it like that, but I'm really crafty. I like to do things with my hands. I'm not great at it, and some of the stuff I make is really ugly, because I don't have a workshop and don’t have all the professional tools. So when I'm building my instruments, I do it as simply as possible. I’m also not into making it too beautiful. I like the roughness. I like to feel the humanity in it. If I were to make them look really professional, they would lose something. The flaws make them more beautiful, and that transfers to the compositional aspect, because I can't exactly tune this instrument. As I open the valves up, it goes up in pitch first and then down. I try to see these flaws as possibilities, not as limitations.

What I love about it is that it's made from cheap, basic materials that you can just get in a hardware store. It’s not precious at all.

I love this as well. The one I play at the moment is made from sewage pipes. That could be viewed as the lowest of low, but in this context, they look beautiful – very sci-fi. It’s about recontextualizing something as simple as a PVC pipe that we have all around us all the time, yet we never think about it. This also goes back to the idea of deep listening. I now see my instruments all around me, but I don't think I would have noticed them at all.

For ātamōn, you were inspired by foghorns and signal horns. When I read that, my first association was rave culture, especially UK dance music, where you heard those signal horns a lot back in the days as euphoria-inducing effects.

Yeah, I remember the writer Jennifer Lucy Allen talks about that aspect in her book. But my associations with foghorns actually go back to the alarm sound I mentioned earlier. Growing up near the ocean, you hear the horns from the boats coming in all the time. And then in the movie War of the Worlds, the tripods make a beautiful sound; I was obsessed with this sound, which came from a didgeridoo. And in Twin Peaks, you have that lonesome single foghorn in the beginning – that is the sound I’ve been coming back to.

The project goes back to this artist residency I did in 2021 in an old iron mine here in Sweden. That mine is located in a valley between two train tracks, so every time they go past, they honk their horns, and it sounds really beautiful. I loved this sound so much, and I wanted to work with it somehow, and then together with my friend Rasmus Persson, I found these 3D printable membrane holders that you could just stick onto PVC pipes, so we tried it out. So it started with foghorns, but as I started to play with the instrument that reference became less important. It was just a catapult.

Since then, you’ve built several of those instruments in different sizes, right? Are you actually performing with them too? Can you travel with them?

I've made four or five different ones, and every organ has its own composition. I have a really hard time stepping away from it. It's like, when I've composed for the version, that's the piece. Two or three I can travel with, those are the smaller ones. I have a flute version that's new, which I play with a handheld microphone. And I have the big one, which I only performed on once. It's just two towers with four pipes on each tower. The one for ātamōn I build on site whenever I play somewhere, so the organizers give me the material, and I just bring the valves and the membrane holders.

How long do you need for assembling?

A day. I’ve gotten quicker. At first I needed three days. And it can be a bit unpredictable. Sometimes I have to switch the membrane after testing it. I just have to solve these issues on the spot. I remember one time when two of the pipes were overblowing, I couldn’t get them down, and then I realized the hose was straight – but apparently, it needs to have a spiral. That’s also what’s fun about it, this problem-solving in a very physical way.

photo: Ekaterina Lukoshkova

You’re referring to the sounds from the instrument as “sound crystals”. What do you mean by that?

Well, it's very rich in overtones, especially when you're listening live. But I think it translates quite well to recording, if you're listening on speakers. You just need to move your head from side to side slowly. The best way I could describe it is that it feels like a prism or crystal that’s turning and shifting. In a reverberating room, it gets stronger. In a dry room, those crystals become more laser-like, more clear. And on the second track [the B-side of the ātamōn album], that's me playing on the sound crystals, walking around with Zoom recorders very slowly.

You said you can’t really tune the instrument though, right?

No, but I do use Hayward Tuning Vine, a program where you can try out different tunings. This is just to kind of find around where I want to be when building the instrument. Then tuning it live is mostly me listening and opening up the valves slowly to find different micro chords within the chord.

This goes back to me just wanting to find my own way, not following any rules. If I were to follow the rules of, say, just intonation, it would go completely against what I'm trying to do. I have my classical background, I play piano, I played viola, I made pop music – I respect all of that, but that's just not what I’m trying to do here. This is something else.

Does it work on headphones as well?

Yes, but of course it wouldn't make a difference if you started to move your head, so you wouldn’t really experience the dimensional aspect of it, but it still works and it’s actually quite interesting to listen to on headphones. In the second track, I'm doing the movement for you.

ātamōn is an old high German word, and even the word we use in German today, “atmen”, is quite similar and translates to “breathing”. So how does breath relate to the piece and the instrument?

I kind of view ātamōn as a receiver and a creature that's trying to tell a story, and it breathes through the different pipes. When I’m opening up the valves, it’s taking a breath. Coming from playing non-breath related instruments, breath is just interesting to me, because it’s something I've never done. The breath and the air have just been so present working with this. The words for “breathing” and “spirit” are closely related in many languages, and this word spoke to me as a capsule for what I wanted to say with this piece. There’s a similar word in Sanskrit, I think it’s Atman, which also means “spirit”. What’s fun is that we have a popular food preservative in Sweden called “atamon”, and it’s available in every store. Just as a coincidence, I found that interesting.

Now that the album and the book are finally coming out – what have you been working on recently and what’s in stock for the future?

I wrote a new piece, “X3”, a commissioned work for the GRM’s Acousmonium, and I’ve played it at festivals in Stockholm and Paris. They’re going to release this in their Portraits GRM series next year which I’m very excited about.

I’m currently writing a piece for the Copenhagen Clarinet Choir, a set of six clarinets, to be performed at the Brønshøj Water Tower, a beautiful space with a long reverb and a helix-spiral stairwell in the middle. The clarinet is quite close in timbre to my organ, so I’m trying to use what the organ has taught me and apply those learnings to other instruments. The performance is going to be in August, and we're going to record it. Then we'll see if and where the recording will be released as well.

In addition, I am also working with Danish filmmaker Majse Vilstrup on a short film about the instrument, and music for a theatre play for next year.

Amina Hocine’s ātamōn is out now on Subtext Recordings.