Like a painter carefully adorning a canvas with colours, shapes, light, and shade, Welsh musician Aisha Vaughan uses her music to gradually form landscapes. Living in a converted barn in mid-Wales, Vaughan makes music that is both a postcard from her home and an extension of the world around her. She slowly bleeds in waves of soft, pillowy ambience to conjure a forest swaying softly in a rainstorm, or a rolling field drenched in a morning har. It’s evocative music that brings with it great peace.
And it’s not just peace for the listener; Vaughan uses music as a cathartic tool for herself too, to help her process the trauma of growing up in a home where music was banned. It’s soothing stuff that feels like a balm against modern society and city life, music rooted in nature. Her second release of 2024 (and her first for Leaving Records), The Gate dissolves more than previous releases; it’s wispier, but filled with more detail. The sound of bird calls, fire crackling, crickets chirping and even a wolf howling make it feel like New Age ASMR made to bask in as incense burns and candlelight flickers.
It’s Vaughan’s voice that carries the seven tracks on The Gate though; a gentle siren leading you carefully through these landscapes. On “Across The Golden Land” sparks of harp gingerly provide specks of light against dim synth backdrops; her coo is like an anchor as the perfumed air sways. The warming “Do You Love Me” offers out tender calls of the title, like Vaughan is singing both to ghosts of her past and to whatever god of nature might be listening, while the reverberating words on “Day Dreams” are demulcent, but with a tone that is unmistakably carefree, like they are hummed notes of a passing stranger sewn together. Like Julianna Barwick, Vaughan recognises that words themselves aren’t necessarily important, but instead the feeling the wordlessness can evoke in a listener’s ears.
It’s hard to come away from The Gate with anything less than a sort of tranquility. Put it on before bedtime and it’ll no doubt help usher you into the dreamworld. Stick it on during a commute and if played loud enough it might help soften the edges of the harsher noises of the world. It doesn’t fare the best as everyday listening though; Vaughan’s music excels in – and really requires – the right mood and setting for its best effect. Take seven and a half minute “A Moment In Space Time” for example, which offers a sort of stillness as bells and chimes rustle before chirping Jürgen Müller-like aquatic synths and the crashing of waves seep into the mix. It’s a splendid tapestry of comforting noises, but it’s equally easy to drift away from if you’re not basking in it fully.
It’s all undeniably lovely and painterly though. “Half Awake” conjures a state like the title suggests, a collection of dreamy, warm hues while Vaughan’s voice calls out, like you are being beckoned back into the real world. Meanwhile the opening track “No Past, No Present, No Future” is a slice of congenial ambience, blending in rainfall and airy wisps of synth like tiny gusts of winds through soggy tree branches. Like much here, it may not push the proverbial boat out to any new destination, but its homely foundation in Vaughan’s surrounding world is sufficient in itself. These landscapes are bewitching enough to just take in by themselves; sometimes taking in what’s around you is enough.
