On 'Rooms', Coral Rose's debut album under the pseudonym 'The Silver Field', the sound artist adopted an introspective tone and a relatively conventional acoustic/electronica template.
For ' Sing High! Sing Low!' she takes a more outward looking perspective even though most of the words seem to stem from conversations with herself rather than from social encounters. "I've been told not to hold on to the past", Rose intones wistfully in Dry Light.
In Hearth Bite, she sings, or rather speaks, of internal conflict and deconstruction, asking rhetorically "Who holds the light?" . In this song, she explains, "I’m trying to understand what it means to love, be loved, and to love yourself in these different configurations."
Rose says that these recordings were done over a five year period and came together in the small Derbyshire town where she grew up. The lyrics and melody to Salt Light were written while walking home from her studio in this town.
In an interview with The Quietus, she calls the record "a voyaging and walking album". One track is entitled Song of Wandering and the closing line in the final track, The Fire Dream, suggests that her journeys are far from over: "all we can do is keep walking", she recommends.
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Rose's voice has the lilt of a folk maiden, heard most distinctly on Day Flowers, but this relatively conventional song is not truly representative of the album as a whole.
What makes all the reflections so striking is the unique sonic world Rose builds around them. Instrumentation includes bass, strings, reeds and drums but these sounds are underpinned by swirling tape loops that create rich organic textures. In the shimmering eight minutes of Talk To Me her voice and music cast a bewitching spell even though the words are barely decipherable.
Rose describes the night walks she took past her old school and out through the fields as "magical and restorative" and this is also a perfect way to sum up the effect this enchanting album will have on listeners.
Bandcamp link
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