| Article number: | 196922824128 |
| Availability: | In stock |
A simple, open sense of awe suffuses the music Olive Ardizoni makes as Green-House. Their debut record under that alias, the calming, contemplative Six Songs for Invisible Gardens, came out in early 2020 via the Los Angeles label Leaving, a longtime home for music with a spiritual slant and a reverent embrace of nature.
Like Mort Garson’s 1976 cult classic Mother Earth’s Plantasia, the first Green-House release took plants and their caretakers as its intended audience. Ardizoni similarly followed Stevie Wonder’s mesmerizing 1979 score Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants in mapping the behaviors of flora onto synthesized compositions, trying to imagine what kind of musical patterns plants might like to hear—or, conversely, what kind of rhythms and melodies might induce in people the opportunity to empathize somatically with their still, unspeaking neighbors.
Ardizoni’s second release as Green-House, Music for Living Spaces, sustains their fascination with nonhuman life. Songs like “Royal Fern,” “Nocturnal Bloom,” and “Sunflower Dance” imbue their subjects with a sense of animist agency, using melody as a vehicle for imagining the interiority of an organism without a central nervous system. To Ardizoni, plants and wildlife don’t merely supply the backdrop to human activity; they are deeply entwined with our species, and available to commune with us should we grant them the opportunity. The world rendered in these songs is not the setting of any one protagonist’s arc, nor does it exist merely to support the narrative of humanity as a whole. It’s a tightly woven mesh of interconnected movement in which we as people are lucky enough to find ourselves tangled.