Well considering the recent British weather (34 degrees temperatures recorded, the hottest June day since 1976, barristers and judges allowed to remove their traditional gowns and wigs etc), I thought about now might well be a good time to revisit Virginia Astley’s 1983 album From Gardens Where We Feel Secure and in particular the track It’s Too Hot To Sleep.
This album has been something of an ongoing touchstone for A Year In The Country and back in the first year of wanderings I wrote this:
“I’ve just put the album on and it’s like saying hello once more to a very welcome old friend. It’s the very definition of bucolic and is an album which summates England’s pastoral, edenic dreams…
“I first listened to music from this album late one hot, hazy, balmy summer night and I was just transfixed and transported. Appropriately I think one of the first songs I listened to was It’s Too Hot To Sleep, which is a gentle lullaby of a song, all lilting and the soft hoots of owls; which in a way could describe much of the album.”
As I said in that first year post, the album’s sense of otherlyness is not overt, it’s more just a quiet sense of something else, of other patterns and undercurrents on the edge of consciousness and sight and that is present in it creating a sense of almost dreamlike reverie or possibly a nostalgia for some lost imagined rural idyll.
Anyways, it’s lovely stuff and rather fine to revisit.
(File Post Under: Cathode Ray & Cinematic Explorations, Radiowave Resonations & Audiological Investigations)
Audio Visual Transmission Guide:
Virginia Astley’s Too Hot To Sleep
Local Broadcasts:
Day #4/365: Electric Eden; a researching, unearthing and drawing of lines between the stories of Britain’s visionary music
Day #118/365: Virginia Astley’s From Gardens Where We Feel Secure
