Eden Lonsdale

Eden Lonsdale presents an album of mystery and melancholy; music composed in lockdown, previously unreleased until now on Flung: ‘Clear and Stormy Horizons’, five works for different instrumentations in which silence is replaced by restless air. A slow burn of haze and longing, offered on tape as a cassette diary of drifting days.

Five spellbinding and spacious works shaped by the quiet focus of lockdown, the album is a window into Lonsdale’s musical mind. The common thread of references to windows, skies, and horizons, reflects the mood of those months, Lonsdale explains: ‘Windows were our only point of contact with the outside world; skies and clouds were what I could see from them; horizons represented the unreachable - our freedom. The music is shaped by a pervasive uncertainty about the future.’

Each piece explores the threshold between tone and noise, hovering between harmonic, airy, rustling, spectral and noisy textures. Like skies that consist of air (noise) and particles which come together to form the illusion of clouds as though distinct and tangible bodies. Similarly, drones figure here like horizons, Lonsdale says, ‘drones are fundamental in all of the pieces. Especially in the way they interact with the more foregrounded material, sometimes in consonant and sometimes dissonant relationships to it.

Thinking about windows, all the music explores the layering of compositional elements and about what happens when these elements drop away to reveal what is going on in the background or when they surge forward to cover up something that was previously foregrounded. Another feature they have in common is an almost complete lack of silence. The waxing and waning happens within the layers of sound itself. White noise almost takes the place of silence here.