Holly Waxwing's greenhouses of the holy

The latest spatial pop pastorals from Holly Waxwing; photographed by Molly Matalon.

The art of progressive musical soundscapes offer new and unique ways to engage with places and spaces that surpass the conventions of previously established lexicons. New breakthroughs in sonic artistic expressions allow us to be immersed, transported and connected to places that consume the whole of our senses with emotions, perspectives and notions that the limitations of language cannot afford us with its arsenal of adjectives and superlatives. Both human built and naturally curated environments ask us to connect in ways that challenge and question our own connection to these worlds (both alien and familiar) and often we look to the new schools of the arts and critical thought to find new tiers of engagement with the worlds that surround us daily that elicit new thoughts and sentiments in our relation to these respective areas of keen interest.

Exploring this is Providence, RI by way of Alabama producer Holly Waxwing who presents The New Pastoral for PC Music accompanied with a manifesto on the processes of penning new electric, maximalist pastorals for today and tomorrow’s audiences. Providing the world over a decade of enlightened electro touched tapestries from Peach Winks, remixes, Goldleaf Acrobatics and more; Waxwing hones in on the places where electronic adjacent compositions intersect within ecosystems of sensational splendor. These are works to further edify the unlimited landscapes found in the great outdoors, as well as offering elevated electro pop menageries for the introverted sorts that prefer the comforts of their cozy indoor domiciles. Holly Waxwing makes visceral music for ecologies and economies where even the most synthetic of rhythmic keyboard sequences feel holistically formed as if sprouted from the earth on its own accord.

The New Pastoral is the soundtrack for your favorite patio botanicals, local park floral and fauna, or the delights of a beloved garden. The opening title track imagines the communication between plants slowly beginning their day, taking in the morning dew, partaking in a communion with their surrounding species in a cryptic natural tongue. "Sister Species" is an ode to the similarities that exist between botanical bodies that spans agricultural conservatories from stem to stern, from trunk to the extent of branches that hold lavish leaves and fruits of their respective labor. Constructs of electro pop are experimented with on "Softcorners" that twinkles, trips, skips and sparkles in a shimmering array of percolating energy where the punchy keys sparkle and glow like a chorus of flowers. Holly Waxwing traverses the expanses of luxuriously curated lines of longitude on “Meridian” that dabbles in throwback witch house club keyboards that are isolated and introduced into the spheres of a spinning globe. Violin strings are blended beautifully with the hums of synths on the mellow “Milkweed” that leads to the closing cut “Arvensis” that serenely blooms with an electric light from a fertile, cultivated expanse of aural land as the chords and keys grow in concert together like a double helix vine sprigging upward toward the heavenly skies that house a beaming sun.

Here come the warm jets, with Holly Waxwing; photographed by Molly Matalon.

Holly Waxwing penned the following expansive meditations on the new release for PC Music:

The New Pastoral is an album of synesthetic storytelling — the emotions, sounds and textures of 6 years of everyday life & listening folded and collapsed into a neo-pastoral narrative. I think an idea that's at the core of the record is taking a certain sense of affection/kinship for a place and transcribing this love into sound. Most of my songs come from a place of exuberance and love, even if it is a sad type of love (e.g. knowing we have limited time left with certain creatures / plants). Not all the songs are pop songs, and arguably not all the songs are even cheerful, but I think they are all coming from a place of affection and/or the mourning that is sometimes implicit in affection. The record isn't Pollyanna, and I am not advocating for nature as an escape from real world troubles, but I think it is a sort of invitation to get out of your head; a quiet reminder that the real world mainly exists outside of our neatly conscribed lives and that personal growth requires us to soften the edges of our thinking and open ourselves up to new types of love/magic. The album is also about discovering new listening modalities. In the time between recording this and my prior record, I spent a lot more time listening to (i.e. attending to, or literally giving my attention to) trees, ecosystems, mycology and birds than I did new music. What does it mean to be a radical listener to one's habitat? How does this shift when it's held at a distance or when one is an active participant and what is at stake when this communication only travels in one direction? How can I maintain a constant flux between the scientist and the animal — the audience and the actor — the observer and the participant? Listening as an act of constant dissolution and reintegration.

Listening to the expressions of earth with Holly Waxwing; photographed by Molly Matalon.

While it's not a concept album, I also had some ideas about Pastoral art/literature swirling around while composing the record. Historically, Pastoral art often acted as a sort of voyeurism and virtual tourism for the ruling/upper class — an Edenic myth functioning as a memory (Williams) that disguised class conflict, animosity, racism and other social issues under a bucolic veneer. Moving forward, how can the Pastoral be transformed into a real, interpersonal and beloved space? Let's create an inversion — a more generous way forward, where collective memory/first hand experiences build out the Pastoral mythology instead. Also, much like Holly Herndon talks about pop music being a great vehicle for complex subtext, I think Pastoral art can have this sort of soft power. William Empson talks about pastoral work being ambivalent and dichotomous, but still containing a harmony within it, and that Pastoralism puts the complex into the simple. While I lean into Pastoral tropes/thematics across the album at times, and really embrace these aesthetics at face value, there are a lot of layers within these moments.

Holly Waxwing’s The New Pastoral is out now via PC Music.