Hannya White’s Who Put the Flowers In the Garden is a short but very striking release. It combines the attractive rigidity of post-punk with disordered analogue sensibilities that have come to define Staaltape as a label. Like the label’s other releases, Who Put the Flowers… is a gift in itself. It's enclosed in a tissue-paper chest which must be at least partially destroyed to reveal the cassette inside. Before you even put this in the deck, it’s thus imbued with a bristling sense of mystery.
While all this serves to heighten the intimacy and intrigue of White’s tape, it’s by no means a crutch. Her music is a treasure in and of itself, with molasses-thick synth textures and a beautifully understated tone. It’s rich with experimentation, too. Field recordings, White’s own unadorned non-sequiturs of spoken word, and prolonged periods of rich, tense stagnancy litter the tape.
These wild elements are corralled together by White’s unique and cohesive production. At one point, we hear a police siren—but even that cannot bloom from the tape’s tar-darkness. It’s chewed up and left sluggish; subdued by the toxic atmosphere. The extremities of sounds are severed, their edges are dulled, in service of a unifying bleakness.
Compositions are equally stark, their simplicity buckling to allow textural elements the spotlight. It’s not for lack of musicianship, though: what’s clear through this album’s fog is that White knows exactly what she is doing.
In the spirit of so much outsider music, this tape’s loneliness paradoxically grants it belonging. It’s so insular and introspective that we reward it with a contemplation of our own most private moments. Often, the work we find most intimate and connective is the one which shouts least for our attention—that which feels transmitted, skull-to-skull, between performer and listener. When reapplied to outsider art, the UK government’s cheesy COVID slogan “alone together” says it all.
Who Put the Flowers In the Garden is, inescapably, a work of extreme isolation. It may be grounded, worldly and characterful—but still a grim mystery dominates its soundscape. We are transported into a space of fumbling darkness, a dystopic art installation design to drive its visitors into confusion. But through this labyrinth of fuzzy feeling come occasional moments of clarity.
The album’s title track is, on the surface, like a COUM Transmissions for the twenty-first century—a piece which marches in taunting repetition, stopping sometimes to splash us with synthesised fizzes and bubbles. But its message is less obtuse, and more optimistic, than any work ever put out by COUM or associated acts. Hannya White offers a call to action; a koan instructing participation in the world. No matter how shadowed things are, we can still bring the everyday and the discarded generously under our gaze. Start with this innocuous little tape—who knows where it will take you.
Who Put the Flowers In the Garden is available for purchase directly from Staaltape here.
Words: Andrew O’Keefe