Here in Scotland, the shapeshifting first month of 2025 has served as a reminder of how hard edged our Winters can be. Sub-zero temperatures for weeks on end, ice cold rain and crazy storm force gales, all backed by grey skies and long inky black nights. Throw in the US doing its best to reimagine Idiocracy as a true story, and all sorts of uncertainty, tragedy and bad vibes around the world, it’s natural to feel both alarmed at what’s going on, and appreciative of what we have.
It’s always around this time of year, as January finally blurs into February, feeling more like a entire season than an month, that we begin to dream of days of warmth, greenery and colour. Those times that when you scroll though your photo library noting that jolt into leafy greens, and bright sky blues, rather than the muted tertiary tones of now.
The key factor in all this is that magic balm of being in a nature resplendent, where the ground is warm, the air is filled with insects and birds, bare arms and legs gently brushed by long grass and mild breezes. As a form of some rose tinted nostalgia, a memory or projection, it’s easy to really start to pine for those times again.
Without too much effort, Hiram’s new album Green Green Earth also seems to quickly transport me into this zone. A relativity brief new album, released by an also presumably currently chilly, Minnesota based musician Matthew Hiram, feels like a welcome conjuring of a leafy paradise.
Green Green Earth is immediately a beautifully realised ambient album, meshing voice, piano, guitar, organ, flute and synthesizer, with field recordings of various wild, and not so wild places.
The first 3 tracks, Viburum, Heartwood and Celadon all feel like brief snapshots, the contrast between each part revealing the underlying similarities and differences. Canopy Song immediately elevates you into that thick drone activating and animating between the ground and sky. Sea of Green, a woozy expanding landscape of cogs and networks, synapses and lysergic outlines rising and falling towards a distant horizon.
Sacre refocuses these tendrils into some point of focus or solidity. Cicada Song tumbles forward as buried flute and huge oily pools of organ, a distant almost percussive throb of a warm evening. The closing track, despite what you may have expected is no drift off. Named after a type of rose (which also appears on the sleeve), Eglantine gently teases apart elongated synth smears from rolling piano mist.
In the 34 minutes that have just drifted by, nothing fell into the background, nothing meandered longer than necessary. It, however, was the perfect accompaniment to the dream of Summer. A gentle reminder that everything is always in a state of flux, these seasonal blues, are all part of what makes beautiful places and times – just that.
It’s clear that Hiram regards his music, practise and discography as a deep celebration of the earth and nature. Despite the fact music broadly grouped as new age can sometimes come across as well-meaning but hollow, here there is nothing empty here.
Green Green Earth is ultimately an album of music that’s simply adjusted to operate at the speed of nature, rather than some over caffeinated, rolling news, human bullshit one…
A tiny droplet of Summer joy – a prelude, conveniently and usefully placed into the thickest gloom of Winter.
Green Green Earth is out now on limited edition cassette and digitally
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