2020 was a terrible year for gardening. It was terrible for peppers, it was terrible for tomatoes, it was terrible for the condition of the soul. But Chad VanGaalen somehow raised a garden all the same: carrots and sprouts and broccoli and a revivifying new album, all of them grown at home.

This is a record that gleams with VanGaalen’s musical signatures: found sound, reverb, polychromatic folk music that is by turns cartoonish and hyperphysicallike ultra magnified footage of a virus or a leaf. Apparently, the LP began life as a “pretty minimal” flute record. (There’s only a vestige now, on “Flute Peace”one of three instrumentals.)

Later it became an electronic record “for a while” and finally, “right at the last second,” it “turned into a pile of garbage.” The good kind of garbage: glinting, useful, free. Music as compostleaves, and branches ready to be re-ingested by the earth, turned into a flower. Throughout these 40 minutes, VanGaalen floats from mania to solace to oblivion, searching for zen in all the wrong places. “Turn up the radio / I think were dead,” he sings on “Nothing Is Strange”; or, on the inside-out rocker “Nightmare Scenario”: “Youre stressed out when you should be feeling very well.”

Whereas once he would obsess over mic techniques, now he puts the microphone in the same place every timetrying to capture a song quickly, the idea at its heart. He’ll act on his infatuationsfor the flute, a squeaky clarinet, his basement’s copper plumbing (remade into xylophones for “Samurai Sword”)and then he’ll try to get out, “veering away from responsibility,” before he overdoes his stay. In the end, it’s like gardening. You have to live with your horrible decision-making; the weather’s going to fuck you if it wants to; and if you plant a hundred heads of broccoli, “now you gotta eat a hundred heads of broccolior watch them go to seed.”
But mostly VanGaalen just tries to be a deer: “I remember seeing some deer come out in the Okanagan Valley once,” he says, “watching them wait for a sunbeam to hit a perfect bunch of grapesand then eating them right out of the sunbeam. I’d recommend that.”

Release date: 19th March, 2021

Tracklist:

1. Spider Milk
2. Flute Peace
3. Starlight
4. Where Is It All Going?
5. Earth From a Distance
6. Nightwaves
7. Plant Music
8. Nothing Is Strange
9. Inner Fire
10. Golden Pear
11. Nightmare Scenario
12. Samurai Sword
13. Water Brother