About the Album
SelvaScapes is a new album written and produced by Perry Frank and danish ambient musician Lauge.
It has been published by WhiteLabRecs, in CD limited edition on July 24, 2021, and then by Valley View Records on August 13 in digital edition.
Selvascapes contains nine ambient / drone tracks with a background carpet of concrete forest sounds.
All the songs were recorded during spring and summer of 2020 in Iglesas, Sardinia and Zealand, Denmark, by the two musicians in their respective recording studios. The album was written and recorded almost completely during the lockdown imposed by the Covid19 pandemic which has forced humanity to rethink both theoretically and, hopefully soon also in practice, the relationship with nature.
Francesco Perra and Henrik Laugensen have known each other in 2020. The desire to create art and the combination of their musical sensibilities created the basis for this first album.
The entire album is inspired by the concept of forest.
In fact, each song has a background of typical forest sounds. The title "Selvascapes" is a word coined by the two musicians as an union of the Latin term “selva” which means forest and “soundscape”, a typical term of ambient music which stands for “sound landscape”.
Selvascapes is therefore a sort of tribute to the forest meant as, in the ecological sense, a place of life indispensable for the survival on the planet of most living beings, including homo sapiens, and in the most abstract sense, as a mental state, due to the confusion and the sense of bewilderment of modern man, also partly taking inspiration from the Dante meaning of the term.
The album starts with Forest, a slow ambient drone built on a sound of the wind thru the branches of a tree. Undergrowth, Leaves and Canopy, continue the introductory speech and develop it with different sounds depending on the title. Listener gets to the middle of the disc with Clearing, featuring more relaxed and clear sounds, which stands for both the arrival of sunbeams typical of a part of the forest where the trees are more sparse, and the end of a difficult period, almost like a rebirth. Sequoia and Myrtle are songs dedicated to two typical forest plants. Myrtle (Mirto) is inspired by the typical Mediterranean plant, intended as a tribute to Sardinia, while Sequoia, is dedicated to the typical plant of west American forests, one of the tallest and longest-lived on the planet.
Windmill Hill, is an ambient drone inspired by the homonymous village located in England, and represents the only outtake of the disc, as the only track not with a forest and bucolic theme but rather human.
Selvascapes ends with Tundra, a place characterized by the absence of forests, a song born as an opposition to the initial part of the album.
The sounds become cold and empty while the sad and melancholy notes, stand for the absence of forest life, the last step before the ice desert.
Canopy's videoclip is available on Youtube from August 13. A new video will be released in September.
Forests are life, an infinite treasure of biodiversity and they represent our last chance to save ourselves.
In the coming decades it will be essential to halt their decline, due to many causes almost entirely of anthropogenic nature, and to favor their recovery and advancement in every way.
Thanks for reading this post, see you soon on this blog.
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