When Los Angeles-based musician Emily Sprague steps away from her folky indie pop trio Florist to make music with modular synthesizers, her music becomes a tool for perception. Listening to it, you start to notice things. Not just about what’s unfolding in the music itself, but also about what’s going on in the room where it plays, and maybe even what happens when the music stops.
Water Memory/Mount Vision collects two tapes of Sprague’s ambient music, both of which were created in the last two years, and frames them with brief spoken-word pieces. Along with artists like Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, Sprague is part of a wave of artists returning ambient music to its spiritual roots, which is to say it’s not afraid of being called new age. Artists like Sprague often use old tools—modular synths instead of computers—and create spaces for relaxation and contemplation.
Sprague is more or less a minimalist, but her work also carries hints of tension. She’s especially adept at taking two compelling elements and exploring how they interact, finding a third “thing” that ultimately becomes the piece. “A Lake,” a slowly unwinding drone consisting of a throbbing bass tone at the bottom and shimmers of high-pitched tones at the top, uncannily evokes the body of water in its title, hinting at lights on a rippling surface and an invisible world spreading out beneath. Its beauty brings to mind the lyricism of Takagi Masakatsu, but Sprague composes with more patience, content to let held tones linger in place for minutes at a time. The primary motif in “Water Memory 1” is a rising and repeating synth tone. Set against a sound that recalls a French horn, it vaguely suggests an orchestrated waltz that got stuck in place, not unlike William Basinki’s Disintegration Loops, but hopeful rather than forlorn.
The Mount Vision half is a shade darker, and also finds Sprague incorporating acoustic sounds. “Synth 1” and “Synth 2” are more focused and intense and also a touch more psychedelic, their fat drones bringing to mind outer space instead of the natural world. The bubbling “Huckleberry” is suggestive of Suzanne Ciani, demonstrating how in the right hands electricity moving through a modular set-up can sound uncannily alive.
“Piano 1” sounds like a recording of the instrument falling apart in slow motion, as Sprague takes a repeating keyboard phrase and pulls it apart taffy, finding a sense of wonder through subtle shifts in tempo and EQ. A variation of the track, “Piano 2,” closes the set, and features the piano sounds mixing with recordings of birds and insects. As it unfolds, a second recording of the piano part appears, slightly out of phase with the first, and the gaps in the notes become longer and it takes on an oblong gait, like a limp. These small, subtle changes define this music. When you return to silence after it’s over, you start to think about what else you might be missing.
