Emily Sprague

Originally from the Catskill Mountains, NY, synthesist, songwriter, and sound designer Emily A. Sprague recorded Hill, Flower, Fog in Los Angeles, CA, before returning to Palenville, NY for the summer.

Emily A. Sprague’s deeply rooted insight and clear-eyed foresight is harbored once again in the newly carved space of Hill, Flower, Fog. “Hill, Flower, Fog is a place and a poem,” says Emily, “a personal letter and vision for myself, outlining priorities that I aspire to incorporate during my time on earth: family, sustainability, patience, and growth.”

Seeking language and dream between the stasis and shift of this year’s blur, Emily found nourishment in transformed daily practices, a process of retrieving the important things from the fog of past routines. Channeling deeply into the here and now fostered a far-reaching connectedness, a lifeline from the everyday to the cosmic.

If Water Memory / Mount Vision, Emily’s first forays into formless music, read as earth-bound passages, HFF scatters more ineffable references across its pages. The maximal stretch of the universe, and germanely, its minimal density, are explored through compositions that search and embrace the infinitude and human condition mirrored, fragmented, and felt in both.

On HFF, Emily invites meditation on perception and sensation in a six part spectra. “Moon View” and “Star Gazing” are cosmic commitments to look up, while “Horizon” and “Mirror” describe abstract views relating to the position of self and its projection outwards. “Woven” and “Rain” represent more textural and tactile impressions, elemental immersions in our earth’s perfectly imperfect patterns.

Each piece varies subtly, yet remains soundly familial. HFF begins with the groove of a restrained, molluscan signal, our ears perceive signs of hope with twinkling momentum. Rippling out in florets of sound, we slide closer to the source as a deeper drone is braided through thrumming tones. A meticulous music box drops notes precisely on an ideal garden, until we reach the collection’s most fine-drawn and final entry, watching little comet tails lighting up a muted scape of the deepest indigo.

The sounds of HFF share a visual space with a series of carefully arranged pictures captured by Emily. Welcome to Hill, Flower, Fog, an artist edition photography book offered with the album, usher the communal story from ether back to burrow, describing moments of pause, peace and communion experienced at home. Light falling across clouds, curtains, lawns and of course, hill, flower, fog. Illuminating Emily’s consciousness and appreciation of things, “simply being here in this cone of time in our universe.”

There is a kinship between the poetry of Hill, Flower, Fog and those revered lines of Blake: “To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour.”

Emily A. Sprague’s Hill, Flower, Fog was originally shared as a Bandcamp release in March 2020, and arrives expanded for vinyl and a full digital release on December 4, 2020 and a full digital release on November 13, 2020. A portion of the proceeds from Hill, Flower, Fog will benefit Lion’s Tooth Project, a community project in service of LGBTQIA+, Immigrant, Black / Indigenous, and POC youth, serving young people in all of their intersecting identities inspiring them to have more agency over their own wellness, healing and personal stories.