Virginia Astley :: From Gardens Where we Feel Secure

The record everyone calls a summer Arcadia is really the consciousness of peace: Auden, fauns in the ha-ha, fields on fire. You inhabit the garden knowing the lawn comes to an end.

There's a feature of the English garden called a ha-ha: a ditch cut at the edge of the lawn, invisible from a distance, that keeps the livestock out without breaking the view. From the windows of the house the park seems to run on unbroken into the countryside; in fact, at a certain point, the ground drops away, and there's a wall, and there's a boundary. The deception is one of optics and of class: the master wants to believe his holdings never end, and the architecture indulges him by hiding the line. Astley gives a track the title "Hiding in the Ha-Ha", and in that verb — to hide the ditch — the whole record is already there, if only you'll agree to stop hearing it the way you've been told to hear it.

Because we've been told it's an idyll. A summer record, they say, the most pastoral there is, the English Arcadia refracted through the slowness of July, Eno beneath the parasol. All true, and all insufficient. And at the outset that idyll is real, it has to be said: "With My Eyes Wide Open I'm Dreaming" is a minuet played by songbirds, squirrels and fawns, the bare joy of being, piano and flute telling each other stories, nature as the space that gathers the universe in. Then "A Summer Long Since Past", bells low in the mix, a Sunday walk towards the church, a la-la-la phrasing that seems to come from some other room of memory. This is the record's morning, and it needs to be this luminous so that everything afterwards can carry its weight. Astley's garden is a vantage more than a refuge: a place from which — from gardens where we feel secure, the preposition matters — one looks elsewhere, knowing that the security is an illusion held up by effort, a view without a boundary because the boundary has been dug and covered over. The debt is exact: Astley lifts a track title — "Out on the Lawn I Lie in Bed" — straight from the opening line of Auden's A Summer Night (1933), a poem in which a man enjoys his own serenity among friends while knowing that his privileged ease rests on hidden violences; and while he lies out on the lawn, in Germany Hitler has just come to power. The mainstream cites Auden the way one reads a plaque. Nobody follows it to the end. Astley does: she takes the exact moment when happiness knows it isn't deserved, and stretches it across thirty-five minutes of piano and flute and recorded livestock.

In Japanese listening notes online, the record is heard as 音による風景画 — a landscape painted in sound — where the animal cries, the bicycle bells, the milk bottles stand level with the keyboard, compositional matter in their own right; and within that fabric, they write, there are 妖精や牧神, the fairies and the fauns. This is no gentle metaphor. It's animism. Astley's lawn is populated, and not by her alone. Where the anglophone ear hears the English countryside — that reassuring thing, made of tea and hedgerows — the ear that arrives from another cosmology hears presences, and it's right. It's in "Hiding in the Ha-Ha" that the presence takes on a body. Listen to how the flute has been slowed to half speed and then raised an octave: the voice of an instrument that doesn't exist, a breath with no human lungs behind it. Here the woodwinds turn almost orchestral, scoring that belongs to Romanticism rather than to the English post-punk of the early '80s — and there's something in it of the 1970s coming-of-age film, that melancholy of growing up that looks back even as it happens. You suspect that half the catalogue of the English pastoral that came after drew from here, perhaps without knowing it. That's where someone is hiding, in the ditch. And when the track closes on the bray of Lilac the donkey, it's the animal that knows about the boundary, and says so.

The day goes on and the record gathers charge rather than calm. The gate that creaks all through "Out on the Lawn I Lie in Bed" — a hinge, a threshold sound, something opening or closing, you can't tell which — becomes the real lead instrument, and the piano circles it the way you circle a thing you don't want to look at. And then "Too Bright for Peacocks", where the bleating of the looped sheep builds the piece rather than accompanies it. It's the beasts that keep the time, impatient, almost insolent, against the most affecting keyboard part on the record. Bucolic experimentalism — the idyll and the thing that bites it, edited together — unique for its time and rare even now. The hotter the afternoon grows, the more there rises what even the anglophone critics, when they're honest, call the record's intrinsic eeriness — and which culminates in "When the Fields Were on Fire", born of a nightmare of Astley's mother, the fields burning from stubble set alight, the firemen putting it out. Folk horror on tiptoe. The garden catching fire while outside it's too hot to sleep.

Here, then, is the reading that runs parallel to the mainstream: From Gardens is not a record about peace, it's a record about the consciousness of peace — about the exact moment when the one who is sheltered understands they are sheltered, and in understanding it, loses the shelter. It's the recording of a privilege watching itself from outside. This is why it still works, why it doesn't date the way the new-age records it gets lazily shelved beside do: because beneath the sweetness there's the ditch, and Astley doesn't fill it in. She hides it, the way the architecture of the ha-ha does, and lets us hear it for exactly what it is: a fall held just out of sight. You inhabit the garden knowing that at a certain point the lawn comes to an end. And the most English thing about the record isn't the countryside: it's the composure with which it doesn't say so.