fortwaldron
calming and beautiful.
saw annie last week in
fort wayne with about 25
people in an incredibly intimate
setting. wonderful. Favorite track: Sun in the Dark.
Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
Purchasable with gift card
$6USD or more
Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
140 gram, pale blue translucent marble vinyl LPs with full color photo labels. Vinyl is packaged in black poly-lined innersleeves & extra heavyweight full color photo jackets. 4 tracks, 37 minutes.
300 copies.
Includes unlimited streaming of Everything Pale Blue
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
ships out within 5 days
Purchasable with gift card
$20USDor more
Clear cassette tape
Cassette + Digital Album
Pro dub Super Ferric tapes in clear shells imprinted with pale blue ink. Package includes a 4-panel, heavyweight French Paper j-card with a 2-color Risograph print & a clear Norelco case. Photography by Sebastian Kim. Risograph printing & design by Issue Press of Grand Rapids, MI. 4 tracks, 37 minutes.
150 copies.
Includes unlimited streaming of Everything Pale Blue
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
Everything Pale Blue is the first collection of ambient music by New York City-based composer and Au Revoir Simone keyboardist Annie Hart. Performed on analog synthesizers and processed through daisy chains of delay, reverb and loop effects, Everything Pale Blue’s warm, sonorous tones and trance-like, minimalist arrangements recall the work of pioneering electronic music composers Wendy Carlos, Éliane Radigue and Brian Eno, as well as German Kosmische Musik groups of the 70’s like Kraftwerk, Cluster and Tangerine Dream.
Throughout Everything Pale Blue, Hart’s gentle arpeggios and playful melodic figures echo the harmonies and rhythms of our natural world, from the cycles of flora, fauna and weather patterns to the orbits of celestial bodies. Everything Pale Blue’s four gorgeously expansive instrumental tracks reward patient listeners seeking calm, melody and meditation.
Annie Hart explains:
“I began composing Everything Pale Blue in November 2020 at an artist’s residency near Oneonta, New York called Aunt Karen’s Farm, which was funded through a grant from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, whose mission is to support arts created by people with children. Normally, it’s a hub of activity, but due to COVID, it was just me, and for part of the time, my family, sharing an open, empty farm space; a true retreat. At first I was a bit bored by the same scenery every day in such a gloomy, wet, gray season, but after a while I started seeing the minute daily changes in the nature around me. Every day I went on walks through fallow fields spiked with mown straw, sometimes wet with mud, sometimes caked with snow, and on some magical days, encased in crystalline ice. I started seeing the trees around the farm as individuals, with their own personalities. I saw the leaves change on the ground from yellow and brown, to dry brown blowing ones, to wet, dark brown precursors to soil that would then nurture the same trees they came from. Obviously, in New York City, we see trees every day, but it is incredibly rare to witness their symbioses with each other and the soil and animals. I started noticing the differences in the bird songs of each species and their various moods.
“At the start of my residency, I visited Green Toad Bookstore in Oneonta where I was drawn to the 33 1/3 book on Another Green World by Geeta Dayal. She’s a great writer and laid Eno’s processes and philosophies out in an incredibly tangible way. I savored that book and bought AGW on iTunes and would listen on repeat while I ate my suppers. I had intended to use my time at the farm to finish recording a pop record, but I soon started sliding out of the typical song structure mentality and sliding into a playing/listening mentality. And I mean “play” in the childish sense. I brought my Oblique Strategies cards that I got for my birthday and I started just going to the recording studio I’d set up in the farmhouse’s living room and doing wild experiments.
“I’d brought along a few of my analog synthesizers (a Minimoog Model D, a Sequential Prophet-6, a Yamaha CP-20) plus some delay, reverb and loop effects. I started to think about just how meditative, playful and creative I could be within small parameters. I composed “Somebody Moves, Nobody Talks” like that, with the idea of how to make my own version of Eno’s studio with tape going around the room, looped on pencils.
“It was incredible to see the shift in my mentality over the time at the farm. To go from gripping and holding to just playing; allowing myself the freedom to create without guilt or responsibility, to see the shifts in my abilities as a composer and musician. It was absolutely magical and I consider that month an incredibly formative one that I am so lucky to have been able to attend and appreciate.”
credits
released May 7, 2021
All tracks composed, performed and recorded by Annie Hart
“Somebody Moves, Nobody Talks” recorded at Aunt Karen’s Farm, Mount Vision, NY, November, 2020
“Sun in the Dark,” “The Earth Loves You Back” and “Context Of Time” recorded at home in New York City, January and February, 2021
Mastering by Dean Hurley
Photography by Sebastian Kim
Special thanks to Doug, Henry, and Frankie Jane Marvin; Aunt Karen and her staff, Charles and Rebecca Gushue; Dean Hurley; Owen Ashworth; and Sebastian Kim. Thank you also to my songwriting group, whose rapt attention for these long songs is what spurred my confidence in sharing them.
I could seriously listen to this exclusively for weeks on end, and have. The sparseness of the music lets you really experience all the synth tones in their glory. It's the best possible hypnosis. Annie Hart
This record hits all my sweet spots of understated vocals, minimal but highly effective song structures and instrumentation, and just that great raw, unfussy feeling. Annie Hart