Gardens are a microcosm. Whether you have a huge space, or a window box, your garden is a convenient overlap between you and the outside world. Modelled to your unique preferences and efforts – it may be focussed on flowers or vegetables, a place you enjoy a morning coffee, or a late afternoon sunshine beer. A window to gaze out of, and watch as birds gather nest materials, butterflies bounce around the flowerbeds, towards that spot you occasionally stretch out on the grass and read a book, or just dream… Your little corner of the natural world.
If you’re lucky to recognise this, it’s likely the garden might become your favourite room at home. An awareness of what parts of the garden gets the first and last beams of sun, and that sense of the seasons changing day by day. It becomes a clock, a diary, the best reality TV programme ever devised, and the setting for infinite micro adventures and discoveries. As a place you spend time, it quickly becomes layered with knowledge, events and memories.
Lorategi, the new album by Basque Country artist Sugaar Pan draws on a version of this place. The album title translates as garden whilst each track is named after different types of flowers. The titles do not reference actual species, more like genres or moods, combining into 9 tracks that align and mingle like some sonic planting bed in your brain.
But whilst the plants and gardens regularly get remodelled elsewhere as a form of gentle ambience, Lorategi quickly gathers into an engrossing, gently out of focus, zoned out form of folk rock. The release comes with a photographic booklet, each page highlighting tiny, lower-case moments captured from Sugaar Pan’s own time in nature, all starting points to far greater stories…
Lore lasaia is the soundtrack to a stately insect procession, resplendent with regal chimes and dancing flutes. Lore pentsakorra is ghosty guitars and moody piano under threatening dark clouds. That storm then rises in the pulsing waves and eddies of Lore narkotikoa…
Somehow the rumbling weather fronts evaporate into the sunbeam helix of Lore inozoa as the grass finds its way between your toes. A symphony of garden-based bliss, guitar strumming, female vocals (by sweet freeze) and male whispers gathering like plumes of dreamy pollen caught in lens flares.
Meanwhile, Paduretako lorea is the sounds leaking out that weird hut in the trees, a barn dance in the undergrowth, spiked with mushroom tea… Lore mistikoa is a brief drift through twisting flutes, bells, and throbbing bass melting into a droning breath. Lore arduratsua is trippy rock grooves bending around a 16 string lyre, as things gurgle and hallucinate. Lore distiratsua, is a crystallised plod towards yet more blackening skies, whilst the closer Odolezko lorea, is splattered in heavy rain and vocal looping patterns before eventually gathering into a drizzly curtain slowly engulfing everything…
Whilst relatively short at 30 minutes, the album is a curious and beautiful listen. It’s surface initially makes the music seem to continually want to be background, however playing it loud enough, or paying close attention reveals a very detailed and potent zone. It’s music that reminds us of Popul Vuh, Montibus Comminutas or Träd, Gräs och Stenar, all ideas that grew out of some sense of the landscape, and inspired potent but subtle music.
Here at OBLADADA, Lorategi has several times offered the perfect soundtrack in our own garden. Superbly timed as summer hits, a music gently marrying and meshing with reality, the details syncing with the rapidly expanding greenery, warm breezes and dappled light, outlining minor events, as hoverflies swarm, the ground radiates heat and birds dart by.
Lorategi offers a rarefied form of ambience, an earthy unhurried listen, a Basque paradise peppered in gentle psychedelic disorientation. Fleeting, but beautiful…
Lorategi by Sugaar Pan is out June 13th here
obladada.com 