PATRICIA WOLF - Music To Watch Seeds Grow By 009: (Yarrow)

If flowers didn't exist, would we be able to imagine them? Could we grasp the inscrutable instinct of plant life and the capacity for abstraction of a cotyledon dreaming of blooming? It's this small vital force, the genesis of every breath, that the project curated by Tia Cousins and Will Troup, "Music To Watch Seeds Grow By", sets out to explore; a sub-label born from Ransom Note, adept at crafting highly à-la-page cassettes, each dedicated to a different plant species and its life cycle. A project poised between new-age sensory exploration, scientific outreach and gardening - each cassette is shipped together with a packet of seeds which, the hope is, the listener will plant and tend while listening to the chosen work.

Preceded by some very interesting chapters, several of them signed by Davis Galvin, Brian d'Souza and the duo Salamanda, this new ninth release has been entrusted to Patricia Wolf, one of the most notable names on the electronic scene, attuned to natural themes and able to translate the secret life of ecosystems by pairing field recording with a style half-procedural in the manner of Caterina Barbieri and half-exuberant in the manner of Steve Reich - all of it steeped in the eternal lesson of Saint Eno of Woodbridge, patron saint of airports.

To record this "Yarrow", the Oregonian artist stayed at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Gothic, Colorado, working closely with the center's ecologists and biologists to explore with greater precision a landscape rich in biodiversity, all to be captured on tape. The result is a two-sided album, one that holds within it both the force of existence and the beauty of the environment, and strips humankind of its (self-appointed) role as governing anomaly.

The first six tracks form a self-contained, heterogeneous cycle, turning the life of the yarrow plant (Achillea) into an epic. "Abiotic Factors", through shifting electronic beds, builds a mood of subterranean anticipation. "Sessile Existence", with dream-pop bounces and arpeggios, opens small cracks of light through which, green and unripe, the shoots already seem to dream of the stem's upward thrust and the dizzying heights of the buds. A sense of sacredness pours over the birth and growth of the flowers; long modulations, luminous as voices singing in unison, layer over synth textures and resonances in a concert of gentle brightness. A morning as bright as a schoolbook, charting the cycle of generation and dispersal ("Inflorescence", "Genus Bombus" and "Seed Dispersal").

"Adapted For Extreme Conditions" shatters the idyllic mood and paints a majestic, cruel landscape. A storm of organs resounds in huge reverbs and glitches of robotic, reversed voices; curses out of the South American jungle breathe into the beauty of the flowers the fury of some arcane deity.

"Ecosystem Meditation", clocking in at twenty-two minutes, scales electronics back to a mere undercurrent beneath a wealth of field recordings. The pristine woodland atmosphere embraces the whispered spoken poetry of Dr. Caradonna, who invites the listener to perceive themselves, in that synchronic instant, as part of an unbreakable connection linking stone, butterfly, star, lion, quasar and cattail spike in the ditches; the teeming swarm of multitudes envelops and hypnotizes, somewhere between Maharishi and a bit of Saturday-morning crystal healing.

A fascinating work, put together with enthusiasm and a certain lightness of touch, able to draw the listener in and evoke the mystery at the origin of everything. A naturalist's prayer to the gods of biodiversity, that our reckless species might lovingly preserve them rather than foolishly sacrifice them on the altar of productivity.

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17/06/2026