Hill, Flower, Fog

Seeking language and dream between the stasis and shift of this year’s blur, Emily found nourishment in transformed daily practices, a process of retrieving the important things from the fog of past routines. Channeling deeply into the here and now fostered a far-reaching connectedness, a lifeline from the everyday to the cosmic.

If Water Memory / Mount Vision, Emily’s first forays into formless music, read as earth-bound passages, Hill, Flower, Fog scatters more ineffable references across its pages. The maximal stretch of the universe, and germanely, its minimal density, are explored through compositions that search and embrace the infinitude and human condition mirrored, fragmented, and felt in both.

On Hill, Flower, Fog, Emily invites meditation on perception and sensation in a six part spectra. Moon View and Star Gazing are cosmic commitments to look up, while Horizon and Mirror describe abstract views relating to the position of self and its projection outwards. Woven and Rain represent more textural and tactile impressions, elemental immersions in our earth’s perfectly imperfect patterns.

Each piece varies subtly, yet remains soundly familial. Hill, Flower, Fog begins with the groove of a restrained, molluscan signal, our ears perceive signs of hope with twinkling momentum. Rippling out in florets of sound, we slide closer to the source as a deeper drone is braided through thrumming tones. A meticulous music box drops notes precisely on an ideal garden, until we reach the collection’s most fine-drawn and final entry, watching little comet tails lighting up a muted scape of the deepest indigo.

The sounds of Hill, Flower, Fog share a visual space with a series of carefully arranged pictures captured by Emily. Welcome to Hill, Flower, Fog, an artist edition photography book offered with the album, usher the communal story from ether back to burrow, describing moments of pause, peace and communion experienced at home. Light falling across clouds, curtains, lawns and of course, hill, flower, fog. Illuminating Emily’s consciousness and appreciation of things, “simply being here in this cone of time in our universe.”

There is a kinship between the poetry of Hill, Flower, Fog and those revered lines of Blake: “To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour.”