Some Press Excerpts
From review of Out Loud Premiere May 2024: “Terri Hron is resolutely feminist… this is a very stimulating proposal, and I’d love to hear more from this young composer.” Frederic Cardin, PANM360, May 2024.
Excerpts from reviews of Luciane Cardassi’s Going North (Redshift Records), whose first track is AhojAhoj:
“The varied colours and vocal interjections in Terri Hron’s AhojAhoj create a clever collection of sonic cross-play.” – Adam Scime, The Whole Note December 4, 2020
“Representative of the recording’s adventurous spirit is Terri Hron’s AhojAhoj (2011), which developed out of correspondence between the composer’s parents and family members behind the Iron Curtain in Czechoslovakia. Excerpts of speaking voices on cassettes are woven into the composition, with “Hello” and “Goodbye” (both “Ahoj” in Czech) surfacing. In keeping with the fact that most of the speakers are no longer with us, the material exudes a ghostly quality, with voice fragments emerging alongside a wide-ranging field of echo, cassette noises, and piano commentary. It’s telling that the latter is but one part of a sprawling collage design rather than the dominant element.” – Ron Schepper, Textura, November 2020
“The agitated stuttering electronics peck around the pregnant space carved out of the opening moments of Terri Hron — AhojAhoj are immediately exhilarating. It’s clear that whilst the sound broadly grows from the piano, this is a reverb filled acoustic space that’s being manipulated as much as the keys. Snaking round a cassette recording of the composer’s family behind an iron curtain Czechoslovakia 9 minutes in, and the listener rolls in a turbulence, reminiscent of the odd lysergic excesses of Don Bradshaw Leather’s wild The Distance Between Us.” – John Nicol, Oblada, September 25, 2020
“Opening with a take on Hron’s 12+ minutes spanning “Ahojahoj” the listener is immediately drawn in by a well haunted, dark intro sequence and soon starts to explore a well Noir combination of haunting electronic atmospheres, twisted vocals and samples with a more documentalist feel alongside spatial, yet minimalist piano manipulations going well beyond the use of keys, strings and hammers” – Nitestylez, October 2020
“This sense of completeness becomes apparent immediately with “AhojAhoj,” composed by Terri Hron. Cardassi’s raw piano manipulations are augmented by the voices of the composer’s relatives— recordings of her parents communicating with relatives located in Soviet-controlled Czechoslovakia. There is a sense of temporal dislocation in the way Hron incorporates sounds from the cassette deck used to make and play back these recordings that were sourced from decades past, yet Cardassi’s piano is locked in synchronicity with the electro-acoustic sounds, rounding off the narrative.” – Byron Hayes, Exclaim, October 2020
From a review of Nesting at the Sound Symposium, July 2018: “One artist balanced on a single leg while playing different sized recorders. Instead of following a score, she improvised. Light, airy puffs that sounded like bird song. Her playing sometimes jived with, and sometimes beat up against the recorded soundscape that played underneath. It felt dreamy, and almost trance like. The sounds seemed to fill me up, and I felt deeply uncomfortable with the silence that followed her set. Lonely for the music that had been everywhere just moments before.” Rebecca Nolan, Sound Symposium Website 2018