Spring Story by Schmo

Spring Story by Schmo (aka Perth, Australia, composer Harry Hohnen) is a collage of sound. It is faint recollections of street corners, the sound of somewhere vaguely remembered and the sound of nowhere all at once. His work evolves naturally, organically opening like a flower in time-lapse, or like the emotion that flows when you open a dusty brown envelope and see an old family photo. As Hohnen himself puts it, “It's not really a cerebral process. It’s practical work of experimenting and crafting.”

From the warm piano loops of ‘January February’ imprinting their hopeful pre-spring melancholy onto your ears, to the textured woodwinds in the touching ‘Black rook in rainy weather’, the songs of Spring Story are lovingly crafted. It’s a product of arranging samples and “trying to find what feels right” with how the music progresses.

“I enjoy tinkering,” Hohnen says, “Moving sounds around, seeing what fits together.”

There’s family connection in Spring Story, too, with the album artwork part of a series painted by Hohnen’s father, its “colour, clarity and calm” matching the distinct daubs of instrumentation that slot together seamlessly throughout the album. Both the jaunty and mechanical ‘Moszár’ and ghostly ‘Hajós utca’ refer to streets in Budapest neighbourhood where his mother's parents lived before they became refugees during World War II. Even the moniker Schmo itself is a nickname given him by his father.

Overall, Spring Story echoes in the mind like a treasure chest of sound, a display case of curios, a modernist patchwork of memories, all expertly crafted in artfully looping vignettes and graceful sound poems — “something from nothing,” explains Hohnen, “placing one room next to another, hoping to create a space that catches light the right way.”

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