Five years in the making, the UK based musical mavericks, Sam McLoughlin and David Chatton Barker, deliver the first culmination of their Environmental Meditation Music project. Conceived as a collaboration with the natural world, drawing on a vast archive of field recordings and nontraditional sound sources, the outcome is not only stunningly beautiful, but presents a radical rethinking of ambient music and how we address arrangements of sound.

There’s nothing better than being encouraged by music to venture off the beaten path. Hood Faire’s latest LP, “Environmental Meditation Music”, does just that. A fascinating collaboration between the pair and the natural world that intertwines elements of folk, field recording, electroacoustic practice, and visionary approaches toward experimentalism, it presents a highly specific sense of abstracted geography and place through sound.

Hailing from the North of England, both Sam McLoughlin and David Chatton Barker have been floating around the UK underground for a number of years, producing discreet works - often issued by Barker's endlessly fascinating Folklore Tapes imprint - that explore regional anthropological ideas, often blurring the boundaries between numerous idioms of artistic practice and research. While the pair have been collaborating for the better part of a decade, their Environmental Meditation Music project was conceived in 2017. Finally, five years on, the fruits of those labours - hewn from a substantial archive of recorded material produced during that period - have been formed into a single LP.

When encountering a list of the handmade instruments used on “Environmental Meditation Music” - constructed from guitar strings, rubber bands, saw blades, clock chimes, jars, and contact microphones - expectation can easily veer toward the type of sonic territory mined by David Toop, Max Eastley, Rie Nakajima, Akio Suzuki, etc., which is to say veering away from tonality in favour of timbre and texture. In actuality, nothing could be further from the truth. The duo’s endeavours, while not unrelated to the aforementioned, effectively form a conceptual ensemble with elements of nature, producing blissful tapestries of sound that fall closer to the efforts of Yutaka Hirose, Hiroshi Yoshimura, and to a certain extent Ernest Hood. In the words of the artists: "Water and air dance and sing. A play of constant ecstasy. We are forever embedded in atmospheric flow. Space held by soft animation. The eardrum moves, mostly beyond attention, and so each leaf, each laughing brook, dripping rock and whistling reed. The same something, always different, forever variegated, changing yet remaining its self."

The result is a curious and engrossing territory of organized sound, made that much more surprising by seeming to bear the presence of electronic synthesis, rather than having been created by processing acoustic and natural sound sources. This presents a rare inversion within the territory of electric sound. Where synthesisers were created to resemble the organic and acoustic, here we have the organic and acoustic resembling synths.

From their vast archive of recordings and sound sources, Sam McLoughlin and David Chatton Barker deftly weave a semi-surreal and deeply meditative world of their own, where elongated tones and shimmering textures defy their own identities and join in a collective dance of off kilter rhythms and harmonics. For all its beauty and seductiveness, across the length of “Environmental Meditation Music” the pair have produced something deceptively simple and approachable. Lingering below is a complexity that provokes a realignment with the value that is placed upon environmental sonority, the incidental, and how sound might be allowed to interplay.

Wonderful and brilliant from its first sounding to the last, if “Environmental Meditation Music” is anything to go on, we can expect great things from the partnership of Sam McLoughlin, David Chatton Barker, and the northern environment in which they live.