Emily A. Sprague
Originally from the Catskill Mountains of New York, prolific musician and sound designer Emily A. Sprague shares her solo environmental explorations on RVNG Intl.
Founding member and songwriter of folk and friendship project Florist, the four-piece she’s been playing and touring with extensively since 2013, Sprague’s earliest solo expressions, Water Memory (2017) and Mount Vision (2018), were reissued by RVNG in 2019. Water Memory was the first long-form instrumental music Sprague ever channeled, unfolding in meditative verses that trace oceans and mountains, memories and visions, feelings and infinity. By contrast, Mount Vision harnesses the residue from a period of intense emotional build up and radical self-healing, trilling unbound into the ether.
Water Memory / Mount Vision was followed by 2019’s full / new, a live document of a 2018 performance at Commend alongside frequent collaborator Lightbath (aka Bryan Noll). During the first month of the Covid-19 lockdowns, the artist then carved out a sonic space for herself that was transmitted on 2020’s Hill, Flower, Fog. Sprague describes the album as “a place and a poem” from which ripple cosmic waves of soul-healing synths tangible with sensation. The album was accompanied by a book of photography by Sprague that captures moments of pause, peace and communion, extending the album’s deep sense of presence and awareness.
Sprague’s solo practice is bound by relationships to time and place as she resonates with and responds to the specific environments that inform her music making. Her new album, Cloud Time, embraces sites of fully activated unknowing as it archives a suite of live improvised recordings made during her fall 2024 tour in Japan. During this series of shows, her first ever in the country, Sprague was guided by a desire to open herself up to the rooms, crowds, and energetic possibilities of each unique performance, rather than imposing a set of preconceived ideas of herself or her sound onto the crowds.
Cloud Time compiles pieces from these shows into a travelog and love letter to the whole voyage taken, performing a sonic archeology of what she says was “a profoundly healing and impactful journey.” Influenced by environmental music philosophy and ideas of the listener as composer, as much as the natural ebbs and flows of life on a tour, Cloud Time finds beauty in the shifting senses, states, and emotions that move each resonant body within a day, around each experience, and through a lifetime.
