
Hana Haruna - The Sandown Clown [Stemms Audio - 2025]The Sandown Clown is a single-track trip into lightly searing 'n' snapping walled noise meets eerier dark ambience. It’s themed around a late 70s UFO encounter, when two children on the Isle of Wight claimed they saw/ talked to a 7-foot-tall, clown-like being. Hana Haruna is the project of Ken Jamison from Portland, Oregon, who also runs the internet-based noise label Basement Corner Emissions. It’s been active since 2018- with its work shifting from crude & unrelenting walling, to more ambient/ progressive takes on the form. To date, it’s put out two hundred plus releases.
This album is a digital-only release, which on its front cover features a green-hazed interruption of the Sandown clown. The album can be found here.
The single track comes in at dead on the thirty-seven-minute mark. It blends together a ‘wall’ built around repetitively crashing, sliding, and swiping static tones, which are woven together in a mid to semi-high-pitched mesh of distortion. Beneath this, we have this hovering & wavering ambient flow- which adds an effective feeling of alien otherness to the track.
The track really manages to pull you in & hold you for its nearing forty minute length- with Mr Jamison skilfully blending and balancing the noise and ambient elements perfectly.
The Sandown Clown is yet another masterful release from Mr Jamison, which is both wonderfully constructed and mood-fitting to the Extraterrestrial case it’s based on.      Roger Batty
|