Music can be a conduit for time travel. Andy Aquarius’s new album, Vale of Tears, feels far removed from the present. Across 12 harp songs, he reflects in the quiet of a retired Church of the Holy Cross nestled in the Croatian mountains. Spacious synths and textured aural environments support harp and voice, which remain the focus. Aquarius sings in a low, warm tone, almost like he’s enchanting mantras. It balances the mysticism wrapped around these songs like vines with an earthy vapor. All of this sound, all of these words, are infused with the spirit of this place and the history that lives in its walls. Aquarius has dreamt and forged a sonic time capsule.
Vale of Tears is OUT NOW.
Foxy Digitalis depends on our awesome readers to keep things rolling. Pledge your support today via our Patreon or subscribe to The Jewel Garden. You can also make a one-time donation via Ko-fi.
First off, what are some of your earliest memories of sound and music? Something that still feels close to you when you think about it…
Two things come to mind – one is Könnycsepp / A Tear by Modest Mussorgsky. I stumbled upon this tune around age six after picking up piano lessons. There was a student concert, and someone had a go at it – I was awestruck. Until I quit sheet music, this would be the only piece I really ever cared about playing.
The other is my grandmother’s dog biting me in the skull multiple times when I was still in crawling mode. Great dog, but he grew a brain tumor towards the end of his life and went a bit mad. It’s probably my earliest crystal-clear memory, and the sound connected to it has nothing to do with teeth hitting skin. Imagine big mercury orbs suspended on wires, bouncing against cartilage in a very slow and oppressive manner, sort of like muffled gongs in empty space. This sound occurred to me a second time, when I was running a strong fever some years down the line.
The Church of the Holy Cross in Croatia is something of a recurring home for you and for your work, going all the way back to Holy Rude (and of course the wonderful Ozbolt organ record!). How did you first learn about this place, and what drew you to it?
Friends of my parents, going back to their university days, are from there, and at some point their father took the renovations of the village church into his own hands. I guess that’s how they ended up with the key to the gate. Now it’s mainly bears & owls living up there, and the church hosts one single mass per year. I was looking for a remote & out of time place like this and recalled passing through years earlier, while on a joint family holiday. I reached out to the Mances, and they said they’d be happy to have me. So I went, barely remembering anything about the organ, the church, and its environment. That year I recorded Holy Rude and The Organs of Matter Wheel.
Has your relationship to it changed now that you’ve been returning each summer?
Now it’s curious how every time I return, more layers seem to unlock and different aspects shift into focus. This year, for example, the church let me know that I had arrived with a somewhat extractive approach, and it started intervening because I refused to listen – eventually, I had to surrender after a storm took down the power grid and an ancient cherry tree. Only then, while hanging out in a dark & unamplified church, did I discover a small wooden door behind the organ that led into the tower and up to the bells. The door had always been there, yet it took me four years to notice and realize that the tower was actually accessible. In the spirit of Carl’s Bolingen project, which kept expanding parallel to his personal evolution, this church slowly reveals itself as we go on.
So, you’ve described your new record, Vale of Tears, as a private full-circle manifesto. That’s a compelling description that has me asking all kinds of questions. What does the circle actually connect for you? Is it the earliest music you made and where you’re at now, or something more?
Two of the instrumentals on this album were among the first tunes I wrote for this project, going back to the Chapel days, but somehow they never got recorded. It felt like clearing out the basement. Then there were the multiple years of getting to know this church and my workflow within it. The expression I wanted for Vale Of Tears wouldn’t have been possible in year one.
Musically, I think it’s the most full-spectrum display of the different directions I explored throughout the years. Plus all the technical stuff & tools I picked up along the way… it really felt like it all came together to make this record possible.
And while the album is definitely not perfect, and in some regards actually fairly flawed & messy, it feels like the most “me” album I’ve done so far, and what else could I ask for, really.
You mention a worsening spiritual crisis as an impetus for seeking out a specific physical location and committing yourself to filling it with meaning. That’s pretty heavy, but there’s something really beautiful in your response to that crisis. I find the dedication really moving. I’m curious, though, why a physical space, specifically, rather than something else to anchor into?
Honestly, I simply wouldn’t know what else to anchor into. We’re physical creatures after all, and usually we don’t really do that well without a sense of rootedness in this domain. And all the creative ways in which we attempt to bypass or transcend the 3D, I don’t think that’s gonna work out.
While being up there for the first time, I received a call from Texas and was informed about the passing of Calvin LeBaron, a close friend and musical collaborator of mine. So there I was, in a place that offered all the silence, space, and proximity to the celestial that I needed to compute what had happened. Nowhere else did I find such direct access to my subtle entrails, and it was the reason I returned one year later to record another EP (Holy Glade) in Calvin’s memory, which kicked off this tradition of making it an annual residency. This church has been good to me. In my mind, it is always going to be there, almost unchanged in form. Knowing that, and that it holds some part of me, has given me an odd sense of stability; I can’t really put it any other way.
Vale of Tears was made over seven days at The Church of the Holy Cross. Can you talk a little about what that week was like? Did your daily routine shape what came out of it sonically compared to how you might normally work?
At this point, this is actually my go-to mode of operation. I have a really hard time clocking in & out of studio sessions, especially when it comes to my own music, so most of what I worked on in the last few years, I recorded in this fashion, in various places. As for my routine, more like a slow-paced frenzy, I usually got up around 7, went for a walk, and then just had a go at it until midnight, rinse and repeat. And regarding the metaphysical & subjective in-betweens… I guess my words would just pull that out of the mystery zone.
You also put a pretty heavy restriction on the record that you wouldn’t add or edit anything to it once the week was up. Did this restriction change your approach at all while you were still inside, knowing you couldn’t go back and ‘fix’ anything?
The longer I work on a project, the harder it gets to preserve the original spark, because that initial spark feels fairly akinetic, and I move out of resonance with it as time goes on. So to me this idea of a hermetically sealed process is like hunting – be quiet & listen, strike quickly, and then chuck it straight in the freezer. Knowing that after this week it’d just be what it would be, with no options to fix or add things, it actually makes it much easier for me to accept and finish a project. It also pushes me to track everything that comes to mind in a trial-and-error fashion, because I’d rather mute a redundant layer later on than find myself missing a key element because I didn’t deem it important in the moment. Taking out the trash is allowed, always. Another advantage is that there’s great clarity with regard to the musical palette – sure, I would have loved some choirs on here or maybe a dulcimer on there… but is that duduk in the room with us right now? So I gotta find that tonality within one of the instruments I got on site.
I love that your Celtic harp is self-built. How does building your own harp change how you approach it? What did you learn from building it that you couldn’t have learned otherwise?
You bind a part of yourself into an object, which makes it become much more of a subject. Guess that’s true for everything created by hand. You start treating your instrument like a person. You wouldn’t abandon them in a smoky backstage or lock them up in a dark & wet storage unit. You say thank you after a show and sorry when they take a knock. You don’t disappear for months and then expect to just hop right back into it… and so on.
And before you know it, a big chunk of your personal cosmology revolves around a nice-sounding piece of wood. Sometimes I wonder what’ll happen if this harp decides to break or vanish.
You’ve talked about how you wanted to stamp a forlorn moment into time. Why this particular moment? What made it feel like this was something to preserve permanently?
It was an active decision that this moment would matter to me. The year leading up to it was a series of mad events sweeping over like an avalanche. I had to almost violently force it to a halt, to then sit in a shielded vacuum disconnected from the outside, and put up a cairn – so that if the avalanche continued, I’d be able to trace my steps and find the way back.
You also described reconnecting with an ancient self, which I find intriguing (and something I feel a certain kinship to, having experienced something similar in the last 18 months with a specific project). What did that reconnection feel like in the moment as you were creating this record? Was it something that grew and evolved from day to day?
It crept in over time, as part of that full circle – I didn’t have this much fun and naivety of a drive while creating since back when I began putting out music as a teenager. Back then there was just so much magic & clarity baked into these explorations. Let’s just assume that our ancient self is very present at birth, then calcifies over time and eventually goes quiet if we don’t actively regrow that chord. It’ll linger around somewhere, but we won’t really pick up any of its communications.
At some point, an absence made itself known, but I wouldn’t have been able to put my finger on it. Something returned to me while I was working on this record; there was a sense of homecoming and of tackling a job that had been sitting in my pipes, collecting dust since the dawn of me-time.
After all was done and I had cleared the church, I walked to my favourite spot, an outlook with a prime view over the mountains and Kupa River. I was still so wired that I wasn’t really able to actually be present; instead, I was on the phone, scrolling. When I caught myself, my fibers condensed into a cloud of judgement, which is when suddenly my ancient self made an entrance. That’s when I got reminded that I’m just the latest model of a mega-limited physical vehicle carting around a timeless self. And me not locking in fully at all times, that’s alright; my ancient self is still gonna do the ‘thing’ it came to do, but if I’m conscious of its presence and we can be comrades in arms, that’ll just be way more fun. And so one lugubrious morrow, my primordial self returned.
What surprised you the most about making Vale of Tears?
That I actually managed to finish the record as planned, without having to scrap a single song. And perhaps Oj Jabuko, that little tune just appeared once I had finished the final recordings and went for an evening stroll. Guess the Croatian spirits demanded a feature. {Oj Jabuko references some of the lyrics from a traditional that goes by the same name}.
This is also your first record to be released independently without an outside label. Was that something you planned from the outset? And what does doing it yourself allow you to do that you maybe haven’t been able to before?
This record was written, performed, recorded, mixed & mastered by me. So somehow it was clear from the get-go that I would put it out myself, as it clearly refused to pass through anyone else’s hands. Doing it this way was/is as unsustainable as it sounds, really. From an artistic viewpoint, there wasn’t any major advantage – no one I ever worked with actively challenged or questioned my creative vision (which I am madly grateful for), and everyone has always been very supportive & helpful. If anything, it was a bit of a downgrade, because there wasn’t anyone involved on a professional level that I could bounce questions and ideas off. Except Elvira Akzigitova, who shot the album cover once again, and who keeps translating my music onto negatives with a miraculous skill & ease. And thankfully I had some close friends provide really valuable input. The next record’s gonna be out on Hush Hush again!
Looking back on the seven days at The Church of the Holy Cross, making Vale of Tears, all of it… Does the record still feel like the experience you had while making it? Or has the meaning shifted since?
What I find interesting currently is to listen to the record and sort of ignore the music – there’s a fair bit of the sound of that church itself in the mixes- and to tune into that and really hear the room’s own breathing marrow, with the music simply being the carrier signal this breath is delivered by. I guess this reframing of the album is something I enjoy exploring right now. Teleports me right back into the nave, sitting on a bench, with the mourning saints looking down at me from within their canvas bodies.
And lastly, to close as always… What are some of your favorite sounds in the world?
The sound of Aeolian harps, because what could be more beautiful than fitting the Wind itself with vocal cords. And then there’s the passing bells at my home village’s graveyard. They have an incredibly archaic, clunky, and desolate ring to them.
Thank you, Brad.
Foxy Digitalis depends on our awesome readers to keep things rolling. Pledge your support today via our Patreon or subscribe to The Jewel Garden. You can also make a one-time donation via Ko-fi.
