CD Release - The Sounds of Science

Hannah Jones doesn’t sing love songs. She’s more interested in other things such as natural environments and magic machines. In the past, Jones has expressed herself through visual art (under the pseudonym Nia and the Cosmic Egg) and playing percussion for Athens bands such as Circulatory System and the Instruments. On her latest project, the New Sound of Numbers, she layers drums, guitar and vocals into a chiming, incantatory journey reminiscent of the Raincoats and Sun Ra.

“I don’t have a scientific mind. But the more that I’ve been painting and working on music and thinking in a certain way, I’m more into science than I’ve ever been,” she says. Noting the common threads between her paintings (pictures often containing kaleidoscopic color schemes and whirlygigs) and her music, she adds, “There’s a lot of similar ideologies — the idea of undercurrents, invisible communication and underworkings of everyday life.”

Liberty Seeds, the New Sound of Numbers’ debut released in October on Cloud Recordings, gathers songs about atmosphere, seeds and experiments. “Tuning the Air” kilts back and forth on drum kicks, and “Minimal Animal” propels along on rhythmic guitar. One topic Jones doesn’t cover on Liberty Seeds, however, is her personal relationships (unless “Frequency Transmission Systems” is some weird kind of metaphor). Instead, she focuses on her relationship with the cosmos. “I tend to be more of an introspective person, and that’s sort of the way I communicate with the world around me,” she says.

Jones recorded most of the album over the last three years, eventually recruiting musicians Heather McIntosh, John Fernandes, W. Cullen Hart (also members of Circulatory System and the Instruments), Kathryn Refi and Josh Skinner to help finish it. The New Sound of Numbers has since coalesced into an Athens-style group with a relatively fluid lineup, save for Jones.

“I like both aspects,” she says of the difference between performing solo and as a band leader. “We have a couple of new songs that we’ve been playing live that we want to record. It’ll be interesting to see how differently it will work, and have it be a band participatory process instead of doing it on my own.”