“Art, like currency, will inflate and deflate with the winds of culture. It will be pegged to social contexts that someone even a hundred years ago couldn’t dream of. Imagine explaining “trending tiktok audio” to Schoenberg.”
Otto Hashmi
Recorder player, artist, and composer Otto Hashmi’s radical creative practice centres around the tensions between the ancient and the modern. As an in-demand soloist, ensemble player, and educator, his artistic output is driven by a desire to explore interpretations of sounds old and new: from early music, to contemporary music, to pop music.
eight ricercate after giovanni bassano — released exclusively on CD and cassette this Friday 21st August — showcases Otto’s multifaceted approach to music-making. Based around recontextualisations of Renaissance composer Giovanni Bassano, and the history of Cold Christmas Church, Hertfordshire, the record showcases collaborations between Otto and composers including Leo Chadburn, Jocelyn Campbell, Ozgur Kaya, Si, and Thomas Shorthouse.
Based in London and working between classical and popular music, Otto Hashmi explores narrative through melody, finding a forward facing voice through historical concepts like horizontal harmony in contrast to modern chord dominated music practices rooted in keyboard instruments and guitar. He has recorded and toured internationally with artists like These New Puritans and Suzi Wu, performs as an ensemble member with groups serpentine.iii and Follia 4, and as a soloist, having recorded for composers such as Anna Meredith and Mario Grigorov. His 2023 EP Music for the End Times explored the uncertainty of the the post-covid era, exploring sounds emerging from the London club scene and recorder harmonies of early music, and was supported by UK and EU performances including as support for Shabaka at Brighton Festival.
Note: an exclusive 30-second mp3 excerpt of each track has been attached to the corresponding sections of this article.
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eight ricercate after giovanni bassano
eight ricercate after giovanni bassano came together over a few years, largely as the result of chronic creative block. The recorder parts were mostly self-recorded at St Mary-at-Finchley Church in August 2025, in the middle of the night. It was a literal lock-in, definitely not the most refined performance but it managed to capture a rawness I don’t think I could’ve achieved in the day with a team around me. Some additional parts were recorded on location at Cold Christmas Church, Hertfordshire (also the location of the cover art) and additional recorder on ‘QUARTA’ by Larli Davies at the Royal College of Music.
Having played this repertoire so much and fatigued with the prospect of creating new music in a world that seems flooded with never-ending “Single out now!” and “Link in bio!” posts, bringing other composers into the creative process was something I knew I needed to do, denying my inner control freak and bringing dialogue into the record, including contributions not limited to classical composers Leo Chadburn, Jocelyn Campbell, Ozgur Kaya, and Thomas Shorthouse.
The project centres around three themes, evident in the music’s recontextualisation.
• the temporal: what connections can we find through the performance of Bassano’s work today? And what links, knowledge, and experience has been irrevocably severed from us through the sands of time.
• the practice: the idea of subverting and reclaiming historical repertoire by building a narrative on a work which was originally meant only as a set of studies. I have found my own story through the music and its history.
• the church: I found myself coming back to Cold Christmas Church, Hertfordshire, as an allegory for this connection to the historical work. Abandoned and partially demolished in 1853, with the most ancient parts of the structure being founded in the 12th Century, the image of this building simultaneously reclaimed by nature whilst barricaded off by safety fence seemed to me a fascinating parallel to our treatment of historical music and its relevance in modern culture and music making. I had visited here as a teenager, and it seemed a fitting representation of my return to roots in this project, embracing many of the darker musical elements which I have been reluctant to embrace in recent years.
Why physical?
Having a physical product has also opened a much bigger opportunity to connect. I am my own online shop, and it’s me posting the album. I’ve had emails from the EU, USA, and further afield. And here in the UK, the act of buying a copy from me at a concert means I can actually meet the people buying in person. I’m really happy that this release can connect me direct to my local musical community as well as niche internet corners that vibe with what I do.
Social media and streaming unlocks unlimited potential audience, but in practice is closer to screaming into the void. An endless cycle of “Single out now!” and “Link in bio!” posts. What value does that music have, when music itself has been so devalued? Bringing scarcity to the project allowed me to disregard the grip of virality, allowing me to focus on creating a work which can exist as a whole. The scarcity, I hope, makes it much more valuable to a listener as they have made the commitment to purchase – it’s not possible for someone to just jump on streaming and flick through to the best bits. I’d like to think it’s not that kind of project anyway.
Why collaborate?
I realised that after years of being unable to really create, I needed to open up to working with others instead of playing the lone wolf trap I’d fallen into for so long.
I noticed around 2024 that I’d been dealing with writers block for some years. I’d just put out Music for the End Times, but most of that music was written back in 2020 and 2021. After that I think I went down a bit of a philosophical rabbit hole about what music really means. When you’ve spent a good year mainlining Flemish polyphony it’s hard not to want to ascribe something sacred to everything you hear or make. More recent chats with phonewifey (aka classical composer Jocelyn Campbell) helped me to realise that sometimes it’s just not that deep. Art, like currency, will inflate and deflate with the winds of culture. It will be pegged to social contexts that someone even a hundred years ago couldn’t dream of. Imagine explaining “trending tiktok audio” to Schoenberg.
I’d become a bit obsessed (psychotic?) about pursuing monophony, moving away from thick textures and complex harmony that I used to love in favour of expressing that density through a single line. I think I’d realised by this point that the theory had overtaken the music, or rather, I’d spent 5 years talking about composing without putting much on paper. Whilst touring Portugal with These New Puritans, Jack [Barnett] suggested that it’s not our job as the writer to always actively signpost these details. Once it exists in the public sphere in many ways it stops belonging to us, being shaped by the perception of audience.
It’s these kind of conversations that showed me just how easy it is to get trapped inside your own head and your own ideas. Opening your creation to discourse is one thing, but to open the creative process was a vulnerability that I’d rarely experience before. But it was so worth it, because the sum of those elements which my colleagues brought to the table is much greater than what I think I would have achieved alone.
Why reclaim historical music?
It’s hard to see it when you’re in it, but for many people in the classical world, early music is something of a dark art. As a recorder player, it’s easy to forget that my instrument as we know it today is intrinsically linked to the 20th century early music revival movement. But then you remember that most classical players don’t see recorder players at all, let alone the early music world.
But in early music spaces I think it is viewed as something of a dark art too. People spend decades studying and perfecting the nuances of a time and geography that we don’t belong to, just to please an audience which moved on 300 years ago. The people we are playing the music for are no longer here. And yet careers are birthed, esteemed, condemned, perfecting the craft of a generation too far away for most of us to trace.
I feel that in early music, particularly in mainland Europe actually, you are not given any space for personal flair in your stylistic voice. I chatted at the pub after performing a concert with a quite high profile recorder player a few months ago, and said that I aspire to have an instantly recognisable musical voice, just like a great singer. They replied, confused as to why I would want to stand out like that.
So with this project I’ve completely taken ownership of Bassano’s work, disregarding historical purity. A lot of my performance is historically informed. But it’s also guttural. It’s imperfect. And I think at moments I can truly hear myself for the first time through my performance. I think it’s rare that historical repertoire really gets to be carried forward like that.
What does this mean for your artistic journey and progress of your career as a multi-faceted artist?
There has always been a battle in my musicality. Half of my brain belongs to the popular tradition, and half belongs to the classical. Too long away from classical and I miss the academia, the long chats about the nerdiest of topics. But pop music is sexy, and brings a meaning to the music that can’t be verbalised. There is a rush both when you walk on stage at Wigmore Hall and at a music festival. They are different rushes and I need both.
This project is really the first time I have allowed all aspects of my musicality to coexist in a primordial soup. My background as a recorder player and the repertoire I know so well. The pop and electronic music influences. My darker musical interests which I am at times cautious to bring to the foreground. I needed all of my contributors to help bring that to life, and I’m so grateful that their input has allowed it to become what it is.
I think my creative block is coming to an end. I have a bunch of exciting commissions as a composer towards the end of this year, and I also want to release new pop music stuff. I’ve realised that the most important thing is being a communicator. When you know what you have to say, the music falls into place.
01 – PRIMA
PRIMA was the first of Bassano’s ricercate to be realised in audio. As the opener, I wanted to present the original ricercar alongside its 4-dimensional extension – as if the resultant electronic soundscape is stretched from it, existing at the same time but never in the same space as it. The electronics become the ghost which haunts Bassano, whilst the ricercar stands as it would 400 years ago, looking at what is to come.
A big focus for me was making something using live sound manipulation techniques, live sampling and granulation as opposed to sound made in the studio. I played this for the first time live at the Leicester Guildhall in 2025 and managed to pull it off, staying pretty faithful to that arrangement on the recording.
02 – SECONDA – with phonewifey
What PRIMA contextualises in sound, SECONDA gives location. We are given the sound of a stream, surrounded by fragments of the melody to come, like a sort of blissful fever dream. The glimmer of sunlight visible when your head is under the water. The melody is fed to us in bites, breaking away from the linearity of Bassano’s original melody. And yet towards the end we are gently, but firmly, made to awaken from the half-dream. “[T]he uncanny space morphs from rainy suburb, to quiet river stream, to airport without you ever really noticing” (phonewifey) as we are pulled to a space far away from the music could have been.
03 – TERZA
It took a lot to allow myself to break the rules here. A big part of this, for me, is reaching back in time to my teenage years. I could spend days on end sitting in a dark room devouring records of pure sound wash like Lurker of Chalice’s self titled, FVCHS ‘Auf einsamen Pfaden wandelt’, Raison D’Etre ‘The Empty Hollow Unfolds’. Sound which can exist without the fear a listener might turn off the record. And as a result, the sounds in TERZA are given space, a silence, enough to collapse in on themselves.
We start with Bassano’s ricercar from St Mary-at-Finchley against the soundstage of Cold Christmas church, but it’s not before long that all sound is stripped away, leaving us in silence. Over the following 6 minutes, pitched down bass recorder and reprocessed flutters of the original melody cautiously emerge like a moth from a cocoon as we cross over to a new sonic landscape.
04 – QUARTA – with Thomas Shorthouse
Thomas Shorthouse described the cover art as a “jumping off point” for creating the soundworld of QUARTA. “I like things that are rotting or breaking down a bit so the idea of this old piece digesting into itself over time, digesting into the modern world, was really exciting. I decided to only use the original recorder material for the most part and then had my friend and collaborator Larli Davies record even more recorder”.
On cassette, QUARTA is the final track of side A. The journey from singularity which we begin in PRIMA reaches its climactic point in the only moment of defined rhythm across the whole 50 minutes, a pounding yet distant downtempo breakbeat which is almost over as soon as it’s started. At this moment, all context is entirely in the now. Everything to follow becomes a journey back to the source.
05 – QUINTA – with Si
I first met Si at the London club night Wraith, where he was performing with artist Charlie Jimenez. I found out after the performance that something had gone wrong with the PA and everyone was working 100% acoustic, but the sound world that all of the performers had created made me think this was 100% intentional. I ended up working with both of them over the following year, including performances with Salvia and the Export Import band.
I had seen Si play solo a few times, a live set somewhere between Colin Stetson and Raison d’être, but never on recording. I knew I needed some of it immortalised for this project.
The irony is, something went wrong with the file transfer after the session, and we were both subsequently traveling so much that we were never in London at the same time as each other. So some first versions of this project have the track QUINTA PLACENTARE, created from our placental jams whilst conceptualising the collaboration. Si’s saxophone dirge ramping into a whirlwind which envelopes Bassano’s melody.
06 – SESTA – with Leo Chadburn
Leo told me that his idea was “to treat the whole piece as one long cadence, with the recorder slightly overwhelmed by the tide of harmony in the second half. Plus, a literal stream in contrast to the metaphorical stream”.
I knew when I heard what Leo did with this that this was the “single” of the project. Leo described this as one long cadence, and in contrast it really does feel like it all happens in a single breath against some of the more drawn out moments of this project.
I am so pleased with the symmetry of project. Elements like the water sounds which mirror phonewifey’s SECONDA were completely uninformed by each other, and yet show an undeniable cohesiveness when working with Bassano’s source material, not to mention how they parallel the river Rib as it runs past Cold Christmas Church. The stream which we began our journey from we now return to, in order to locate the source.
07 – SETTIMA – with Ozgur Kaya
Ozgur describes SETTIMA as “[placing] the composition into our hyper-digital now, conceptualising the cyberspace as a vast, unpredictable ocean of data & the unconscious, raising questions about Human-Machine intimacy. By recontextualising the early forms through hyper-digital aesthetics and use of generative-AI, this track paints a picture depicting the use of technology to immortalise fading memories & spirit.”
The use of granulation, and the way this is paralleled in SECONDA, to me represents a journey back into the dream state we are awakened from in SECONDA. There is a symmetry throughout this project, and we return to dreams easier than we were awakened from them.
“I began the journey by sculpting a dense enviroment – creating sounds sourced entirely by manipulating the original recorder sample I received from Otto. The soundscape is underscored by the faint breathing of a sleeper navigating a strange, dream-like space & as the textures slowly accumulate towards a breaking point, the track abruptly comes to a stop.
Through this fracture, a resurrected version of the main motive arises from the latent space, transforming Bassano’s melody into something that sits between memory, lullaby and a madrigal.”
08 – OTTAVA
OTTAVA opens where this project exists conceptually. Up until now, we’ve heard snippets of atmospheric sound from the proximity of this church, but the opening of OTTAVA was performed directly outside of the decaying Cold Christmas Church. My ganassi tenor recorder (by the late Adriana Breukink) is pitched at A=466, but threatens to meet us at 440 through the biting cold. I had wanted to record the whole thing outside, but truthfully it was just too cold to get a good take where my fingers didn’t play up.
In a symbolic gesture, the rising A minor scale at around 1:20, where most interpretation would soar for a full-bodied high A, I allowed the pace to grind to a halt, lingering on this delicate note and allowing it to crumble under its own weight, before taking a pause.
Upon my reentry the electronics rejoin the mass. We are no longer in front of the church today, but somewhere outside of time itself. Flickers of original melody return through a mesh of modulation and distortion, the ghosts we were introduced to in PRIMA are laughing at us in tongues we can’t understand anymore. But when the final section enters to round off the collection, it becomes buried under distortion until we can no longer hear what it could possible have to tell us. We never quite hear when that final note lands, but the trail of feedback it leaves makes us certain of its presence, enveloping almost every frequency for over a minute. When it does finally fade, we are back at the church, the dry cold of winter, before the mic is abruptly cut.
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eight ricercate after giovanni bassano is exclusively available for CD and cassette (physical only), releasing on 21st August 2026 – pre-order the record here:
Learn more about Otto Hashmi and his practice:
- https://www.ottohashmi.com/
- https://www.instagram.com/ottohashmi
- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgdf7rOneaGWtYcjLeGwwKg
Learn more about each of the involved composers in eight ricercate:
- https://phonewifey.bandcamp.com/
- https://jocelyncampbell.net/
- https://www.thomasshorthouse.com/
- https://ualshowcase.arts.ac.uk/project/489135/cover
- https://www.leochadburn.com/
- https://www.instagram.com/___ozgurkaya___/
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