Right here’s a cool new musical mission that feels each out-there and intensely mundane. In 2022, the good Colorado experimentalist M. Sage teamed up with Lieven Martens underneath the title Sage Martens. Their album, Using Fences, was an ambient classical train designed to discover the thought of “Western” music. They’re again this yr with one other conceptual providing that speaks to the deepest elements of my dad-soul — although, primarily based on their artist’s assertion, possibly I shouldn’t really feel nice about that.
Out simply in time for Memorial Day weekend, Chamber Music For Garden Mowers is a meditation on the American want for a well-manicured yard. The album combines newly composed music with area recordings of precise lawnmowers, which lend an incredible ambient impact to Sage and Martens’ gorgeously flickering collaborations. As somebody who experiences a substantial amount of peace from the method of mowing my garden, I’m connecting with this music on an innate degree, nevertheless it’s additionally a critique of the way in which our tradition’s compulsion for neatly chopped grass contributes to the destruction of the setting. So… that’s not nice.
The music, although, is certainly nice. Right here’s how they clarify the report on Bandcamp:
Do you know, a clean-cut garden is a want we inherited from the British?
Sure, the British dumped this pleasure into our collective consciousness. These humorless Victorians who loved having their black pudding on the garden. They got here to this uninspired impression whereas mis-looking at Italian work. Sure certainly, whereas gazing at these work they mistook inexperienced lanes for inexperienced lawns. Thus it grew to become hip. Each stuffed truffle commanded his gardener to chop the grass.
In consequence, this Victorian lust for sterile gardens with fairly inexperienced lawns nudged our world into water spillage and pesticide clouds. This new precedence produced exhaust clouds and prudish monocultural landscapes.
Simply by Italian work.
As with most of Western historical past, the observe was exported to America after which turbocharged. By shearing clear the prolific brush of pastures, prairies, forests and glens, biodiversity turns into an aesthetic casualty with lengthy struggling ecological ripples.
An inherited observe narrows the bandwidth of expertise.
And so, the childhood behavior of buzzing alongside in key to the drone of a gas-powered mower whereas trimming a suburban garden extrapolates into one thing expanded; an unanswered query in regards to the harmonics of panorama practices.
Two songs from Chamber Music For Garden Mowers are out now, the opening title observe and the nearer, “Music Between The Blades.” Pay attention under.
Chamber Music For Garden Mowers is out 5/27. Purchase it right here.