Convenient that I realized that I hadn’t yet posted Virginia Astley’s debut full-length, From Gardens Where We Feel Secure, on Easter Sunday, of all days (though I did share her very important Hope in a Darkened Heart a few years back). While From Gardens is a squarely summer record–suggesting from all angles the soporific heat of peak July–it is about as pastoral as music can possibly be, which means it’s a record that I start reaching for at the first signs of spring. Alongside Claire Hamill’s Voices, it paints a picture of a heavily romanticized ideal of the British countryside, refracted through childhood memories and the heavy lethargy of summer. Both the album title and the track title for “Out On The Lawn I Lie in Bed” are taken from W.H. Auden’s 1933 poem “A Summer Night,” and fittingly From Gardens recreates the experience of a summer day in its entirety in chronological sequence, with the A side titled “Morning” and the B side “Afternoon.”
It’s languorous, unhurried, and arguably a true ambient record in how well-suited it is as background music, something which Astley herself pointed out in a radio interview: “Whoever’s listening could lie down and put it on, and not really listen to it that much. Just have it on in the background.” Songs aren’t structured like songs so much as curiosity-driven variations on motifs–it’s easy to imagine Astley arriving at a piano refrain that she found particularly pretty, and playing with it until organically arriving at the next “song”–all of which flow seamlessly into one another uninterrupted, just like the experience of a particularly hot day.
More specifically, in addition to being a true ambient record, it’s a freak outlier in how nakedly beautiful and fully realized it is, especially for its time. As Simon Reynolds details here, there was no culture for music like this in 1983. Britain was in the thralls of post-punk and post-post-punk, with sounds going in thousands of different and gritty directions but certainly not backwards, and it’s easy to imagine detractors calling From Gardens just that–regressive, anti-avant-garde. There was something very brave about structuring an entire record around nostalgia and what is very legibly a deep love for bucolic Britain, referencing romanticism and Auden and a lifestyle that it’s difficult for me to imagine as anything other than aristocratic. Yet while Astley was classically trained, From Gardens was clearly informed by a vision that was very novel and fully her own: her personal field recordings made in the village of Moulsford-on-Thames, spun together with luminous piano, flute, and xylophone melodies, with small and elegant hints of electronic manipulation: church bells that chime forever, glitchy manipulation in “When The Fields Were On Fire,” the looping sound of a creaky swing swing gate* forming a pseudo-percussive backbone in “Out On the Lawn I Lie In Bed.” Astley is honest in her nostalgia for something which no longer exists, and she knowingly depicts it in an overly-perfect, hyperreal way that suggests it may have actually never existed at all. But it’s all hers, from start to finish: Astley wrote, recorded, and co-produced From Gardens herself, but moreover she saw the gardens, remembered them, and reimagined them in a way that no one else could. Happy spring–I hope you enjoy.
*I incorrectly heard that sample as a swing, but since Astley very considerately labeled and time/location-stamped all her samples, I’m happy to report that it’s a gate!
Tracklist:
1. Michael Tanner & Alison Cotton – Masts of Rown-Tree
2. Bongwater – The Drum
3. Kraftwerk – Tanzmusik
4. Paul O’Dette, Andrew Lawrence-King and David Douglass – The Glory of the Sun
5. Palace Music – West Palm Beach
6. Julianna Barwick – Adventurer of the Family
7. Zbigniew Preisner – L’enfance
8. Richard Youngs with Alasdair Roberts ft. Donald WG Lindsay – Kinning Park
9. Sonic Boom – Ecstasy in Slow Motion
Another one from the understatedly brilliant Soichiro Suzuki, aka World Standard. This is a completely different beast from the last of his records that I posted–it’s effectively lyricless, and is less a pop record than it is a somewhat anonymous amalgam of different folk traditions (though there’s plenty of Japanese folk in here). Hosono provides production and sounds; Hosono would later go on to release Soichiro Suzuki’s also excellent World Standard II on his then new FOA label.
This record is deceptive, heartbeaking, and again, understated–I think I probably heard it two or three times before I properly listened to it. It doesn’t command attention, but once it gets its hooks in you, they’re stuck. A slew of string instruments from all over, very tasteful percussion, and gorgeous wordless vocal layering courtesy of Pizzicato V (!) and Sandii (!). Alternately playful (opener “太陽とダァリヤ,” which, in perfect Hosono form, has an abrupt Beach Boys-esque reverb vocal harmony breakdown), moody (“逝ける王女のためのパヴァーヌ” is an appropriately cinematic version of Ravel‘s “Pavane pour une infante défunte”), and deeply emotive (“水夫たちの歌声” has left me in tears a few times). There’s something reminiscent of Penguin Café Orchestra–the music is pastoral and very evocative, but it’s not totally clear of where or what, and it feels oddly timeless. Weightless and heavy-hitting. If it’s for you, it’s definitely for you.
A springtime mix compiled in April of 2018 by Nick Zanca of Quiet Friend, whose recent debut you can hear and buy here. Featuring warm textural jazz, pastoral synth pop, and gorgeous choral accents. You can download an mp3 version here. Illustration by Guy Billout.
Tracklisting:
1. Iasos – Tropical Birds At Sunrise (Excerpt)
2. Cocteau Twins – Cherry Coloured Funk (Seefeel Remix)
3. Jon Lucien – Kuenda
4. Milton Nascimento – Travessia
5. The Small Choir of St. Brandon’s School – Bright Eyes
6. Jane Siberry – Map of the World, Part 1
7. Prefab Sprout – Nightingales
8. Gregorio Paniagua / Lucia Bose – Nana de Una Sola Rota
9. Eberhard Weber – Quiet Departures (Excerpt)
10. Sachiko Kanenobu – み空
11. Popol Vuh – Höre, Der Du Wagst
12. Gareth Williams + Mary Currie – Raindrops From Heaven
13. Chas Smith – After
14. Janet Sherbourne – Ivory
15. Pat Metheny + Lyle Mays – “It’s For You”
16. The Toronto Children’s Choir – Friday Afternoons, Op. 7: Cuckoo (Comp. Britten)
Here’s my most recent episode of Getting Warmer for NTS Radio. If it isn’t painfully obvious, I recently revisited the 1993 version of The Secret Garden, something I watched obsessively as a kid. This time I was struck by its gorgeous soundtrack, the moody world it lives in, its textural depth, and, as is often the case with my childhood movies, its easy elision of colonialism. This mix is about the pastoral, in the British countryside sense but also seeing the pastoral elsewhere. It’s about the projection and fantasy of exotica, musical migration as a result of colonialism, escapism, and essentialism; and is somewhat of a continuation of this mix. It’s also full of birds, bells, and field recordings, because it’s spring, sort of. You can download an mp3 version here. Thanks for listening!
Tracklisting:
1. Fernando Falcão – Revoada
2. Jean C. Roché / Birds – Palmar
3. Toshifumi Hinata – Fire And Forever
4. Mecano – Hawaii-Bombay
5. Per Tjernberg – They Call Me
6. Zbigniew Preisner – First Time Outside
7. Francis Bebey – Forest Nativity
8. Virginia Astley – Sanctus
9. Kudsi Erguner & Xavier Bellenger – Rahat-Ul-Ervah: Le Repos Des Esprits
10. Virginia Astley – From Gardens Where We Feel Secure
11. Kelan Phil Cohran & Legacy – White Nile
12. Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, Yvette Mimieux & Charles Baudelaire – To A Passer-By
A less-heard but very deserving later work from the master, Hiroshi Yoshimura, by multiple requests. Though you’ll recognize a familiar fascination with water sounds, here the focus is on synth rather than piano. A love for pastoral, rolling keyboard motifs is still very present. If anything, by 1993 Yoshimura had burrowed even further into the tension between the natural and the artificial: though Wet Land is clearly preoccupied with visions of nature, here they’re rendered in hyper-synthetic, heavily produced language, and are all the more beautiful for it. Though this is busier than his earlier material, much of it feels in keeping with the hope Yoshimura and his peers had for “environmental music”–which, according to Ashikawa, was
…music that could be said to be an object or sound scenery to be listened to casually. Not music which excites or leads the listener into another world, it should drift like smoke and become part of the environment surrounding the listener. In other words, it is music which creates an intimate relationship with people in everyday life…Also, [it] is not the music of self-expression or a completed work of art; rather it is music which by overlapping and shifting, changes the character and the meaning of space, things, and people.
This is long out of print; however, if you’re interested in Yoshimura’s work, his Music for Nine Post Cards (the first installment in the Wave Notation series) was recently reissued by Empire of Signs and is available for purchase here.
This blog started with the intention of sharing records that more people should hear, and I think that’s more the case for this record than any other thus far. It occupies a strange mid-point, both in visibility and in the context of the artist’s body of work. It’s been reprinted a handful of times, and its Discogs recommendations include acts as disparate and big-league as Mike Oldfield, Pink Floyd, Kate Bush, Tracy Chapman, and Prefab Sprout (begging the question, who exactly is listening to this record?). Claire Hamill debuted on Island Records, opened for Jethro Tull, and made several very big-budget albums. She dabbled in folk, synth pop, and electro before landing on Voices, which has been (somewhat confusingly) labeled as new age. It’s perhaps owing to that very difficulty in pinning her down or understanding her body of work that her work itself, with its dazzling high points, seems to have slipped through the cracks. We missed the trees for the forest.
But backing up: after an audition for Island founder Chris Blackwell, Hamill released her debut at seventeen, an impressive piece of folk that belied her age. It immediately drew comparisons to Joni Mitchell and was advertised in Time Out with the tagline “When most girls are frantically hunting husbands, starting work in Woolworths or learning to type, Claire has finished her first album.” (Happy International Women’s Day, by the way!) But despite her label’s high hopes for megastardom, her records continued to fall flat of large-scale acclaim. After a few more folk-rock efforts on a new label, Hamill ended up on CODA Records, Beggars Banquet’s “new age” imprint. She released Touchpaper, an ambitious electro-sophisti-pop record about which there are some great notes here, and then, while living in the English countryside married with a new baby–“a sweet time in my life”–decided to make a record using only her voice. Entirely self-written, self-produced, and featuring just a bit of synth and drum machine, Voices feels like a pared-down predecessor to Camille’s Le Fil. She uses her voice not just as a choir but as strings, as as keyboard, and as texture, all the while staying attentive to inclusions of inhales–they’re emphatic, but never oppressive. Songs like “Harvest,” which so clearly evokes a chorus of women reaping wheat, manage to worldlessly distill the bucolic ethos of what Aaron Copland needed an entire opera to do. Despite repetitive motifs and loops, nothing ever slogs. Everything moves.
What’s really shocking about a first listen, though, is how clearly you can hear threads leading directly to and from so many important artists. At the risk of sounding like the token music journalist who compares every female artist to every other female artist, you can explicitly hear the Celtic-tinged multi-tracking that Enya would go on to make a career out of, Kate Bush’s emotional fluency, a Cocteau Twins cavernous goth sensibility, Julia Holter’s polished baroque, Virginia Astley’s loving chronicle of the English countryside. Nothing folky, but totally pastoral. A (mostly) worldless spectrum of feeling. There are jewels to be found throughout Claire Hamill’s career, but Voices is her strongest, and perhaps most unsung, stroke of brilliance.
A note that while I always encourage you to buy records you love whenever possible, Claire has been personally funding her continued independent music-making, so if you love this as much as I do, please consider buying it!
Hard to pick a favorite release from Hans-Joachim Roedelius, who’s contributed to 92 different releases, according to Discogs. Though most famous for co-founding Cluster and Harmonia, he’s been even more prolific as a solo artist. Wenn der Südwind Weht (“When the South Wind Blows”) was his seventh solo release, though he followed it up with a casual 35 more full-lengths, most of which I still haven’t heard. Of his earlier releases, this is both my favorite and the most exemplary of signature Roedelius. The most remarkable moments are when synthesizer acts as a vessel for his pastoral sensibility, with unabashedly sentimental lines of synthetic oboe, clarinet, organ, and something theremin-like sitting on top of rolling piano chord pulses muffled in golden-warm reverb. The title track, “Veilchenwurzeln,” and “Mein Freund Farouk” are the best instances of this kind of classical miniaturism–they’re what make this record feel like a favorite sweater–but in very German tradition, a handful of the other tracks meander into more shivery, drawn-out synth meditations (and that’s certainly a good thing). Ideal rainy day music.
The only available recordings from Satoshi Ashikawa, who passed away shortly after making this record. This was the second in a three record series called Wave Notation, which also included Hiroshi Yoshimura‘s Music for Nine Postcards and a collection of Erik Satie songs played by Satsuki Shibano–fittingly, fans of Yoshimura and Satie will find a lot to love here. Perfectly bare bones minimalism–just harp, piano, flute, and vibraphone. Crystalline, pastoral, picnic-ready. Midori Takada on both harp and vibraphone. Long out of print.
From the liner notes written by Ashikawa himself:
“Sound design” doesn’t just mean simply decorating with sounds. The creation of non-sound, in other words silence, as in a design, if possible, would be wonderful. There’s no question that our age — in which we are inundated with sound – is historically unprecedented. The Canadian sound environmentalist and researcher Murray Schafer warns of this state of affairs in the following: “The ear, unlike some other sense organs, is exposed and vulnerable. The eye can be closed at will; the ear is always open. The eye can be focused and pointed at will; the ear picks up all sound right back to the acoustic horizon in all directions. Its only protection is an elaborate psychological system of filtering out undesirable sounds in order to concentrate on what is desirable. The eye points outward; the ear draws inward. It would seem reasonable to suppose that as sound sources in the acoustic environment multiply – and they are certainty multiplying today —the ear will become blunted to them and will fail to exercise its individualistic right to demand that insouciant and distracting sounds should be stopped in order that it may concentrate totally on those which truly matter.”
We should have a more conscious attitude toward the sounds – other than music —that we listen to. Presently, the levels of sound and music in the environment have clearly exceeded man’s capacity to assimilate them, and the audio ecosystem is beginning to fall apart. Background music, which is supposed to create “atmosphere,” is far too excessive. In our present condition, we find that within certain areas and spaces, aspects of visual design are well attended to, but sound design is completely ignored. It is necessary to treat sound and music with the same level of daily need as we treat architecture, interior design, food, or the air we breathe. In any case, the Wave Notation series has begun. I hope it will be used and judged for what I had in mind as “sound design,” but of course the listener is free to use it in any way. However, I would hope this music does not become a partner in crime to the flood of sounds and music which inundate us at present.
Peak British folk. Bridget St. John is most well known for the trio of excellent records she released between ’69 and ’72 on John Peel’s Dandelion label. This, her debut and the first in the series, is the most bare-bones and raw, with guitar that’s alternately sunny and somber. It’s also blessedly absent of the goofy optimism that made many of her peers less palatable (and, unlike many of its contemporaries, all the songs on it are self-composed). Her voice is remarkable not just for sitting in a notably low alto range, but for its consistency of non-expression, as if she preferred to let her androgynous bard quaver and her direct lyrics speak for themselves. The follow up to this record, Songs for the Gentle Man, is also worth seeking out, but it’s more padded out with instruments, and feels somehow less pure for it–I love how Ask Me No Questions is unabashedly moody, dappled with the occasional patch of sun (the eight minute long closing title track is dense with field recordings of birds and church bells). Perfect fall soundtrack.
Convenient that I realized that I hadn’t yet posted Virginia Astley’s debut full-length, From Gardens Where We Feel Secure, on Easter Sunday, of all days (though I did share her very important Hope in a Darkened Heart a few years back). While From Gardens is a squarely summer record–suggesting from all angles the soporific heat of peak July–it is about as pastoral as music can possibly be, which means it’s a record that I start reaching for at the first signs of spring. Alongside Claire Hamill’s Voices, it paints a picture of a heavily romanticized ideal of the British countryside, refracted through childhood memories and the heavy lethargy of summer. Both the album title and the track title for “Out On The Lawn I Lie in Bed” are taken from W.H. Auden’s 1933 poem “A Summer Night,” and fittingly From Gardens recreates the experience of a summer day in its entirety in chronological sequence, with the A side titled “Morning” and the B side “Afternoon.”
It’s languorous, unhurried, and arguably a true ambient record in how well-suited it is as background music, something which Astley herself pointed out in a radio interview: “Whoever’s listening could lie down and put it on, and not really listen to it that much. Just have it on in the background.” Songs aren’t structured like songs so much as curiosity-driven variations on motifs–it’s easy to imagine Astley arriving at a piano refrain that she found particularly pretty, and playing with it until organically arriving at the next “song”–all of which flow seamlessly into one another uninterrupted, just like the experience of a particularly hot day.
More specifically, in addition to being a true ambient record, it’s a freak outlier in how nakedly beautiful and fully realized it is, especially for its time. As Simon Reynolds details here, there was no culture for music like this in 1983. Britain was in the thralls of post-punk and post-post-punk, with sounds going in thousands of different and gritty directions but certainly not backwards, and it’s easy to imagine detractors calling From Gardens just that–regressive, anti-avant-garde. There was something very brave about structuring an entire record around nostalgia and what is very legibly a deep love for bucolic Britain, referencing romanticism and Auden and a lifestyle that it’s difficult for me to imagine as anything other than aristocratic. Yet while Astley was classically trained, From Gardens was clearly informed by a vision that was very novel and fully her own: her personal field recordings made in the village of Moulsford-on-Thames, spun together with luminous piano, flute, and xylophone melodies, with small and elegant hints of electronic manipulation: church bells that chime forever, glitchy manipulation in “When The Fields Were On Fire,” the looping sound of a 
Guest mix by Cheval Sombre (
Another one from the understatedly brilliant Soichiro Suzuki, aka World Standard. This is a completely different beast from the 
A springtime mix compiled in April of 2018 by Nick Zanca of Quiet Friend, whose recent debut you can 
A less-heard but very deserving later work from the master, 
