'The Black Hill, The Glass Sky', available now via Bandcamp and Boomkat.
The project takes shape around a text by art historian Eloise Bennett, referencing Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, Nancy Holt and Margaret Tait. “Moving through the grasses and bracken as shades,” Bennett writes, “we hear the shifting of green-grey branches, watch the dew falling, the rock soften.” Her rhythmic, sensual words speak of verdant landscapes and thick clouds of smoke, surging through the album's 11 tracks like a spell, seeping through the artists' eroded vocals and suspended, weightless drones.
Voice runs strongly through the album, often unsettled, as language loosens and drifts like weather - masked by drone and tape noise, warped through vocoder, or reduced to bare resonance. Elsewhere, the work turns toward traditional and archaic instrumentation. Bells, whistles, zither, harp, and cello ground the music in older forms, their timbres carrying a sense of inherited presence. Electronic elements appear sparingly, used to thicken air and space, conjuring fog, expansive terrain, and the dream-like movement of light across water.
What emerges is a slow, open, and haunted landscape, where sound acts less as narration than as echo and residue, marked as much by absence as by presence.
Tapes are available now, and the album will be streaming from tomorrow.
Cassettes include a screen-printed outer case on metallic card, and a riso insert printed by
@good_press
Huge thanks to all involved for this beautiful collaboration <3
𝗖𝗿𝗲𝗱𝗶𝘁𝘀
Somewhere Press, SP09
Photography by Somewhere Press
Design by
@mushetofernandez
Text by Eloise Bennett
@eloiserosie
Mastered by Adam Badí Donoval
@adambdonoval
Distributed by
@boomkatonline
Music by
@gemmablackshaw
@alliyahenyo
@dylan__kerr
@baal_mortimer
@archambaulthannah
@diane.isadora
@laureboer
@mattemattik
@princessa_mangione_iii_
@doris__dana
@teresawinterr
@maryhurrell
@dania_paralaxe
‘Embers’
Mixed by Samuel Stevenson
@clima____
‘Weave & Bury’
Harp - Claire Deak
@c.l.deak
Cello - Judith Hamann
@judith.hamann
Mixed - Dania and Rupert Clervaux
Words - Eloise Bennett