Garlind by Milieu

GARLIND, a new Milieu ambient pastorale for the 2020 holiday season, available as a name-your-price download for the rest of this horrific year. I have not released any new holiday-themed Milieu since the SNOWRADIUS triple-album three years ago, and although GARLIND was a conceived idea on paper back then, it took a few more Christmases before I got the formula right.

What you're hearing when you press play is the vocal coda from "Merry Christmas Darling" by The Carpenters, processed live through my R-EW Audioholistics modular system, augmented only by a two-note sinewave bassline generated with a self-oscillating SSDP Jade Series phaser, sequenced on an Arturia Keystep Pro. The session was broadcast live on my Twitch channel just a few days ago, and after a careful mastering job and the application of a field recording detailing wind through leafless trees, GARLIND is finally ready to be published.

Why sample The Carpenters, you ask? Well, as a kid, my father had one or two homemade mixtapes of Christmas music that he'd assembled via dubbing them on the fly from WKZQ, the FM station we listened to a lot in Myrtle Beach through the 1980s and 1990s. One of these tapes contained a transitional moment before a track, where the vocal coda of "Merry Christmas Darling" was left intact before playing the track he wrote on the tape label, and for this reason, my nostalgia in and of Christmastime is directly connected to those few seconds of close vocal harmony. I've wanted to find a way to expand this sample at the molecular level for years, to canonize it within my own creative landscape, and now I feel that I have finally been able to realize it properly after spending the entire year building a modular synthesizer system.

You might also listen to this and find yourself wondering why it seems as dark as it is? GARLIND, for me, bottles up all of the frustration and depression of carrying on with Christmas amid a global pandemic, a shitshow election and all kinds of other local/national/global problems, and attempts to make sense of it using the voice (and likeness) of Karen Carpenter, a neutral and time-separated sample of childhood nostalgia, a counterweight of positivity, optimism and pure youthful exuberance. Somewhere in there, the dark Winter of 2020 can be brightly lit by the hopeful warmth of a new year, and if my music can be another voice in that choir of empathy, forgiveness, charity and humility, I am happy to provide it.

NOTE: This and all other holiday-themed releases I've done are FREE/NAME YOUR PRICE for the rest of 2020. Here is a handy list of all of them:

https://milieumusic.bandcamp.com/album/swirling-tinsel-singalongs
https://milieumusic.bandcamp.com/album/snowradius
https://coppicehalifax.bandcamp.com/album/soft-shelter
https://coppicehalifax.bandcamp.com/album/green-shape
https://coppicehalifax.bandcamp.com/album/blue-vale-snowdream
https://coppicehalifax.bandcamp.com/album/green-shape-ii
https://coppicehalifax.bandcamp.com/album/green-shape-iii

Tracklist

1.	Garlind	60:35

Credits

released December 18, 2020

W/P by Brian Grainger. Principally recorded live at White Pillar, December 2020, using the R-EW Audioholistics modular system, with subsequent edting and mastering work following three days later. Mastered by The Analog Botanist. Photography and text by ABM&D. This is Milieu Music number MMC010. milieu-music.com analogbotany.com

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