Hannah koegler’s translation project

By Eli Thayer

“I’m so intimidated by the harp, physically.” 

Sitting on Hannah Koegler’s couch in her Glasgow flat, I know what she means. I can feel the instrument towering over me; even with my back to it, the harp’s presence is tangible. The harpist (a term Koegler only recently decided she was comfortable applying to herself) sits across from me, her gaze occasionally drifting toward the harp as she speaks. It’s as if it has a hold over her, understandable considering the time she’s dedicated to the instrument. But her words tell of a symbiotic relationship; one in which instrument and musician trade moments of control, carefully working in tandem to create something greater than the sum of its parts. 

The fruits of this partnership abound on Koegler’s recent Translation Project, recorded in collaboration with the St Andrews Centre for Exoplanet Science. The Centre’s ‘Multilingual Science Fiction’ project aims to translate global works of science fiction into English, with the goal of broadening English-speaking perspectives beyond the traditional sci-fi canon. Koegler’s album is one of a number of multimedia projects commissioned alongside the translations to provide external interpretations of the texts. As an academic resource, Translation Project is vital proof of the value of collaboration between experts from different disciplines, and the beautifully unexpected results. As a work of art, it is a rare glimpse of an artist truly coming into her own and discovering what it is that makes her perspective unique.

“It’s contained within glass and metal”

Koegler recorded Translation Project at the tail end of the 2021-22 academic year, shortly before her graduation from the University of St Andrews. During that period, the Laidlaw Music Centre and its resident harp were her constant companions. The relative isolation led Koegler to experiment with techniques and sounds beyond what one would expect to hear in the mystical forests and Renaissance courts that mentions of the harp tend to conjure. Koegler made frequent use of chrome slides, a favourite tool of country-western and blues guitarists, in her quest to stretch beyond the harp’s limitations. When the first track, ‘Two Conversations (Hindi)’, discards all semblance of its haunting melody in favour of an atonal soundscape replete with unsettling scratching noises that resemble an intruder clawing at the window, it sets the tone for an album seemingly hellbent on destabilising (and disturbing) its audience.

The project derives in part from science-fiction’s adaptation of the anthropological concept of first contact: how cultures interact upon learning of and encountering one another, and the ethical and moral implications of such meetings. Sci-fi writers have extended the theme to theorise humanity’s first contact with intelligent extraterrestrial life. Koegler’s vision of first contact takes the form of songs inspired not just by a theoretical encounter, but also by the world that would bear witness to such an event. Translation Project is built around communication, but that foundation extends beyond humans and aliens conversing. On the one hand, the noise at the end of ‘Two Conversations’ (the working title for which was ‘Chatter’) evokes alien voices; where I initially heard clawing and desperation, Koegler imagined dialogue between inquisitive species. Listening with that context in mind, the tonal shift into inconstant territory is joined by the bold, enticing unfamiliarity that propels all good sci-fi.

On the other hand, the album represents a different sort of dialogue, one more grounded on Earth: the push and pull of nature and technology. Although the recording took place in St Andrews, the production mostly occurred following Koegler’s move to Glasgow. The bustling cultural hub contrasts sharply with quiet, coastal St Andrews, and the tension between the two locations is evident throughout Translation Project. Pastoral plucks deftly weave through industrial clanks and bangs, all the while accompanied by ambient swells and the unpredictable string intrusions that constitute Koegler’s trademark. She describes listening to demos while strolling down country paths, juxtaposing unkempt, natural sights with the sleek, metallic enhancements emanating from her earbuds.

Koegler’s primary spots for workshopping ideas outside the studio, however, were botanic gardens. Contrary to the natural facade that they cultivate, Koegler sees botanic gardens as existing in opposition to the wilds of the countryside. On a base level, she appreciates the gardens for their winding paths and hidden crevices, which enable her to achieve total privacy even while observing other visitors passing by. But beyond their physical structure, Koegler draws inspiration from the greater concept of these man-made constructions of imagined paradise which she refers to as “industrial representation[s] of nature.” “We’ve created something that doesn’t exist,” she says, “and the way that we’ve presented it is completely aesthetic and perfect.” 

Koegler’s nuanced fascination with botanic gardens could serve as a thesis for her approach to the album as a whole. There’s a level of trepidation surrounding the attempted beautification and restraint of nature, doomed to fail as it may be. Nonetheless,  accompanying that caution is a certain respect for those who would dare to face the natural world and decide that it not only can be controlled, but done better. The consequences of the industrial age have dragged humanity and nature into conflict as never before, making  communication and understanding vital to prevent catastrophe. Translation Project paints a world in which nature and machinery work in parallel, if not in collaboration. It’s a disquieting backdrop to thoughts of exploring the galaxy and meeting new species - how can we focus on other planets if we can’t live in harmony with our own? As I walked from Glasgow city centre to Koegler’s flat, I passed sprawling public parks, extravagant museums of art and history, and rows of brick warehouses and semi-operational smokestacks, all in the span of a few blocks. In retrospect, her seemingly conflicting creative inspirations had been justified to me from the moment I got off the train.

The careful cohabitation between nature and modernity is most evident on track three. ‘On Frequencies (Catalan)’ mixes a strict quarter note arpeggio with a beat taken straight from a finely-tuned assembly line. It sounds like the inside of a dollhouse: everything is pretty and orderly, and the projection of perfection never pauses. Toward the end of the piece, however, the real world fades in, bringing sounds of city streets and children’s voices into focus. Koegler recalls sitting alone in a park in Barcelona, listening to demos, when “all of a sudden, the park became filled with children.” She presciently began to record, and in doing so captured a vibrant scene of daily life within the unnatural confines of a city park. ‘On Frequencies’ settles  conflicting ideas, the botanic gardens debate playing out over the course of one song. It’s not quite a battlefield, more a reluctant acceptance from both sides, nature and modernity, of the sheer immovability of each  opposing force. Koegler sits caught between a rock and a hard place, simply trying to take it all in.   

“A very unsophisticated process on a very sophisticated instrument”

Koegler worked on the album alongside producer Jack Mosele, whom she met in London where they were both working on music for a fashion show. She describes picking through sample libraries together, searching for sounds evocative of metallic, mechanical environments. Koegler was especially drawn to machines that replace or supplement basic human functions, such as sewing machines, iron lungs, and power drills. Beyond the foundation of the harp, nearly every aspect of the record’s production derives from these industrial building blocks. All percussion is comprised of “organic” sounds, including car crashes and crackling fires, and the backgrounds and in-between spaces are crammed with the clamour of spaceships and factories. 

Koegler and Mosele coordinated primarily over long distance, a situation that forced Koegler to surrender some control over her recordings. Although she retained full creative direction, both the recording and production processes led Koegler to develop a positive “relationship with mistakes and chance.” Many of the pieces emerged impulsively - using alternate tunings, unusual arrangements of the harp’s pedals, and odd microphone placements - and were recorded in one take, due in part to Koegler’s inexperience with recording software. ‘On Frequencies,’ for instance, was performed in what she refers to as a “never tuning.” Having let the harp sit untouched for over a month, Koegler returned to the instrument and began recording without tuning it, effectively ensuring that the piece can never be perfectly recreated.

The two ‘Improvisation’ tracks similarly encapsulate Koegler’s do-or-die approach: as the titles suggest, the base tracks were recorded spontaneously. Koegler speaks of learning to trust her ear, as well as the rest of her body’s relationship with the harp itself, by picking the brains of her musician friends. “It took a village,” she says, but the result of her investigation enabled her to work with the harp, rather than against it. Mosele’s production supplements the improvisations, adding starkly intentional synthesised melodies and pounding beats to the harp’s nimble, free-time dance. More so than on other tracks, the effects on ‘Improvisation’ 1 and 2 seem to submit to the performance, accommodating its frivolousness instead of conforming to a structure. In addition to their musical merits, the improvisations offer Translation Project’s most impactful statement: that humanity’s attempts to prescribe nature through technology will always falter. 

“If I asked you, would you consider this to be music?” 

In a way, musical instruments are alien lifeforms themselves. The harp was created by humans, but its inventors could not have imagined every sound that could possibly emerge from it. Harpists of the past would be shocked by today’s innovations, a pattern that will almost certainly continue. And yet, despite the impossibility of the task, it is human nature to test boundaries, if for no other reason than so that our successors can pick up where we left off. It therefore makes perfect sense that Koegler, coming from a background in classical European-style training, would arrive at scratching her strings with metal tubes and joining her sound with the rhythm of factories. Translation Project fundamentally aims to look forward, and first does so by reflecting on the present world around it. The album rejects the pinnacle of yesterday’s achievements in favour of relative simplicity. Textural variety trumps singular feats of musicianship, and industrial assimilation threatens to overwhelm individuality and free expression. But in the end, nature’s will proves to be too powerful to overcome, as it has time and time again.

Nowhere does the broader philosophical point or any attempt to innovate overshadow the beauty of the music on Translation Project. By the end of our conversation, despite her words to the contrary, I am confident that Koegler has long since ceased to be intimidated by the harp. Awed by its capabilities, certainly. But their relationship is one of equals; a complex synthesis of human and extraterrestrial, nature and machinery, harp and harpist.

Learn more about Multilingual Science Fiction and Translation Project at: https://www.multilingualsciencefiction.com