Songs for a Changing Season

On Wildflowers, Slow Listening, and Connecting Through Music.

I know it’s cliche, but things move fast, and sometimes it’s hard to keep up. Seriously, like *poof, before you know it, a couple weeks have gone by. I started putting this playlist together a while back, and things got busy. But that globe keeps on spinning, and the music persists.

Meanwhile I’ve been excited to release my own new music, and working to navigate whatever craziness is currently going on. In that, we are all together. Lately nothing seems more important than learning how to stay calm, love each other, and be happy.

It’s been raining and hot here, which means the flowers are thriving. As the season settles in, we embrace with open arms. Summer is always a great time for setting intention, fulfilling goals, and closing chapters. Shedding that which no longer serves us allows us to move forward. We feel sorrow for what’s been lost, and hope for what is yet to come.

I’ve gathered some recent writing below on impactful new works emerging from the modern sphere. There’s also a ten-track playlist, for 44 minutes of willful escapism. Music always helps. It connects us, and brings perspectives of the world which we would never otherwise experience. I’ve continued to return to these albums and build meaning as the days pass.

Join as we cross through forests and fields of black-eyed susans, collecting seeds and scraps of rusted metal to be used as practical tools of navigation. Along paths both real and imagined, we receive these lovely works of bright, creative reflection.

Stream the full mixtape on BuyMusic Club: Midsummer Music for Gentle Escape

St. Silva - “And the Catbird Sings”
From the album Forager (AKP Recordings)

We open with a gorgeous work from St. Silva’s upcoming album on the stalwart AKP label. Vermont composer Ben Dexter Cooley twists time and sequence into new shapes, forming a fluffy, cool pillow woven from wild-harvested Sphagnum moss. Forager evokes the ancestral mode of gathering from naturally available sources, holding a tidy mirror to the artist’s creative practice and the emotional landscape of the work itself.

Minimal and elegant, the album brings an elemental viewpoint shining with ethereal radiance. The music moves with a quiet, animal awareness, grasping subtle shifts within ourselves, along with the world around us. As our physical framework changes, we discover crucial new phases, reflected both inward and outward. Through patient attention, we begin to recognize deeper, essential truths. While patiently in pre-order mode, we’ve seen two glimpses so far. Things bode well for July 17th, when the complete work finally arrives. The sun will be shining, wherever you are.

Matt LaJoie - “Hot Springs Greyhound”
From the album Gram’s Room (Flower Room)

Right now we’re completely surrounded by tall, blooming wildflowers. Rudbeckia triloba, I think? True erasure of all that is negative is sadly fleeting, but the eternal cycle remains reliable. LaJoie’s music is about reactive time. It’s spontaneous, explosive, and built from pure, mirrored outlook. Gram’s Room is one of several recent offerings from the Maine based guitarist and composer, released on his in-house Flower Room imprint.

The latest bears a return to form, tapping into that great stream of eternal cosmic consciousness that LaJoie treads so comfortably. Gram’s Room speaks to light and shade, to air and smoke, like an overgrown path home through the great growing green. Thanks be to the seemingly endless energy flowing through LaJoie’s golden fingertips. Long live Flower Room, bringer of the violet flame.

Carlos Ferreira - “catalyst”
From the album a failure is imminent and may cause unpredictable error
(Lighten Up Sounds)

From here, Carlos Ferreira‘s latest album is a warm, cracked orb. The album’s mouthful of a title mimics hardware and system warning language commonly found in computing and corrupted digital media, which echoes the textured, glitch processing of the proceedings. But the work feels organic, radiating life like a soft, glowing memory.

The albums visuals bring this into parallel, using natural forms of corrosion to represent the electronic process of transmutation. It’s an expansion of the artists’ register, twisting his guitar into strange new landscapes of raw, rusted fragment. Through these works Ferreira offers a gateway to our own forgotten dreams, as clouds dissolve into broad, humid sky. A gift of blissful erosion.

Saapato “Ferns Breaching Wet Soil”
From the album Seasons Turn Like Pages (Aural Canyon / Window Sill)

The natural world sharpens into focus with Saapato’s recent album published on tape by Aural Canyon and digitally through Brooklyn’s Window Sill Records. Saapato is the project of upstate New York artist Brendan Principato, who weaves manipulated field recordings and lush electronics into sound worlds that feel both ecological and subconscious. He’s been busy lately, and this is a welcome entry in a recent row of consistent eco-bangers.

Nearly micro-botanical, Seasons Turn Like Pages brings sheer iridescence, with the pulse of new growth emerging. He’s since released a heady remix of these works titled & Pages Burn Like Candles, which shifts perspectives, bringing these same tracks into all new shapes and spaces. From that giant storybook in the sky, tale neverending. Spore songs for damp days.

helllhound - “the pleiades”
From the album Here in the Valley (Constellation Tatsu)

Long associated with change, Pleiades (aka Seven Sisters) represents a cosmic calendar that ancient cultures used worldwide to track the shifting of seasons. helllhound is the collaboration of life partners Cadmar Fitzhugh and Nailah Hunter, with this being the debut full-length from the project. Born out of transition from LA to the remote mountains of the Sierra National Forest, the record reflects a period of transition with a shift into the wilderness.

These natural green spaces always help to bring us into deeper alignment with ourselves, and with each other. The music shares this awareness, broadcasting a receptive sensitivity often too quiet to hear in the modern world. Here in the Valley calls to the nearby fourth dimensions, connecting zero-point through the crackling air surrounding us. Change is how we grow, afterall.

Shakali - “Unoi’us”
From the album Toinen Luonto (Not Not Fun)

Shakali is floating through inner-space on a handmade bamboo raft. Finnish multi-instrumentalist Simo Hakalisto makes wobbily mind-travel music, using instruments both ancient and futuristic. With reeds and strings alongside oscillators, singing bowls, metallophones, synths, and amplified objects, it’s more Darrell DeVore than Martin Denny, but the work is neither obtuse nor impenetrable. Shakali’s music is earthen and rooted in soulful expression, like clean, damp soil.

With a slew of notable improvisors and collaborators, including saxophonist Julian Overall, percussionist Timo Juntunen, and flute from Les Halles, Toinen Luont is crispy and cloud-soaked. The album weaves through various potent strains of resonant form, a sweet, jute jawbreaker for slow dissolve. From the great Not Not Fun, one of the best to ever do it. They’ve seamlessly crossfaded across the substrata since 2004, tapped into the deepest current, but somehow it all feels like one big happy family. Level unlocked, a bold new wave of post-exotica has arrived.

Mosaicist - “A pillow of grass”
From the album Waves of Summer Grass (Evergreen Music)

Pristine and elegant, Waves of Summer Grass is a nearly flawless offering of delicate bamboo bell, flute, birdsong, and spiritual melody. Like air moving over green pasture, Mosaicist’s invisible approach quietly walks the trail of the British pastoral tradition. The work is deceptively simple, but expansive in vision, and gorgeous in its elusive narrative of dynamics. We slow to receive the gift of this moment, to listen, and to deliberately move forward.

There’s a clarity and precision to the artists voice, with subtle motion through the trees behind, and a careful balance at play. It’s stimulating and healthy, like a cold shot of chlorophyll. Another strong entry from the great imprint Evergreen Music, whose catalog is steadily growing. More please, I wish this is what everything sounded like.

Chihei Hatakeyama - “Unconsciousness Silence IV”
From the album Unconsciousness Silence (Constellation Tatsu)

Chihei Hatakeyama creates music made from delicate flower petals. Each note has been methodically dried and pressed, carefully extracted from a precious broken daydream. Unconsciousness Silence shifts our internal calibration, as the breath slows and we enter a state of brave introspection. Guided by light, yet we dwell in darkness. A prolific artist amassing over 70 solo releases, Chihei Hatakeyama also works as a mastering engineer, as well as operating his own label White Paddy Mountain.

Hatakeyama is our spectral escort, a beacon focused through these hazy modes of faded thought. Without Hatakeyama, I fear we are truly lost, doomed to each fall victim to the violent storms of mind and memory. Guided by distant reflection, we each step forward. There is no with, nor without: only being.

Hawksmoor - “Corvus III”
From the album The Silent Harvest Volume One (Folk Police)

I'm interested in the space between memory and abstraction, where the old forms dissolve into something new. Corvus III delivers a cryptic message passed between worlds, selected from this compilation focused on artists reworking traditional folk musics. Hawksmoor takes inspiration from dream research, occult history, and early electronic music, using a blend of synths and guitar to form mysterious soundscapes.

UK label Folk Police Recordings is back in action, raising funds and awareness for conservation initiatives. Featuring artists you know, and likely several you don’t, the release brings a broad range of experimentalism to the concept. Vol. 2 just dropped too, so pull on your boots. The Silent Harvest shows the depths one can dive into the rich source material of the folk music tradition, especially with a few extra cords and cables handy.

Stray Wool - “Ellipsis”
From the album The Sorrow (Evergreen)

We all deal with grief in our own ways, and forward is the only way through it. The latest work of UK artist Stray Wool embraces the imperfect, finding momentum through motion. The artist follows a path of spontaneous composition to process grief and isolation, creating these lovely new works of melodic transport. Built over the course of several years, the album focuses on the act of intuitive creation.

With piano complemented by accents of field recordings and electronic process, The Sorrow represents a kind embrace through presence. Grounded but ethereal, Stray Wool brings a ray of light and moving air, choosing hope as a pathway beyond the now. Yet another excellent release on the great Evergreen label, with a prime offering of forward-thinking ambient music.

As the brilliant poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore wrote:
“If you cry because the sun has gone out of your life, your tears will prevent you from seeing the stars.”

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Photos from The Dickeyville Grotto and Shrines.

And that’s enough for this round, thanks for being here.

If you appreciate the words, please consider subscribing. If you like the tunes, be sure to support the great artists and labels who make the magic happen.

Stay in touch, smell the flowers, and hug the ones you love.

☮❣ — Matthew

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STONEWASHED by Matthew Hiram

Stonewashed is a chronicle of creative reality, tracing the inner and outer landscapes of life and sound.

www.matthewhiram.com

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