Sporting a cover of purple lavender flowers blooming in a very English forest, it makes perfect sense that this album is what it is. Originally released in 1983, Virginia Astley is a slightly odd singer/songwriter who is still making music and has, over the years, collaborated with everyone from Siouxsie & The Banshees and Bill Drummond, to, more recently, Touch/R&S artist Locust, Japan’s Silent Poets, as well as David Sylvian and Ryuchi Sakamoto. Strangely though, From Gardens Where We Feel Secure, features only a small section of her singing and is otherwise almost entirely ambient. Seven years ahead of The KLF’s wonderful Chill Out, this is a the aural equivalent of a spring picnic in a very English countryside. Instead of Elvis and steel guitar and rambling ambient Amercana this is a very English experience –right out of a Famous Five book, a long lost mythical countryside. Church bells ring, birds tweet, flutes and piano all come together to make a serene ambient listen, made all the stranger by the way it teeters on the edge of twee.
Sebastian Chan
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