Those who do are greeted with quite the collection. Released in 2017, Mouth Mirroring Ear introduced the instrumental aspect of Blue’s work, its psych-inflected folk soundscapes charting New Weird America in all of its scale and detail. Sound Portraits From The Gelmer Tastle Odyssey (2020) pushed further into free folk territory, playing the soundtrack to a film both surreal and fond, a description which also fits the 2021 releases, albeit in very different ways. Just compare the off-kilter reflection of ‘Born in September’ from Little Dry Creek to the frantic and dramatic ‘A Bio-Forming Populous Cross Cut Into Oblivion’ on Bowl of Art Fruit. Each of the records might fit under the banner of free folk or New Weird, but even these loose labels fail to portray the variety present. Better to just step in and allow them to stand for themselves.

The good folks at Furious Hooves released the four Loretta’s Museum albums over the past five years, and have recently teamed up with Blue’s own Frillimcaster Records Unlimited to put them out on cassette for the first time. In addition, they also released Collected Streams: Singing Songs 2014-2021, a kind of ‘greatest hits’ release of (as the title suggests) Blue’s work with lyrics/vocals, as a special edition vinyl. Essentially an all-access ticket to Loretta’s Museum, allowing the listener to explore every nook and cranny within.

We took the opportunity to ask Loretta a few questions about the release to dig a little deeper into their influences and creative practice.

Hi Loretta, thanks so much for taking the time to speak with us. How does it feel to release a new record and revive a handful of older ones on tape?

Hello, thank you for reaching out. It feels quite exciting to have these new releases in physical form. I love holding objects in my hands and having something tangible to account for the things I’ve created is really important to me. It was also a lot of fun to work with Ryan McCardle in the design and layout process of all these tapes and vinyl.

There’s a noticeable distinction between the instrumental, soundtrack-adjacent work of the four records and the more traditional songs of Collected Streams. Do you recognise a clear distinction between these styles? Are you more attached to one or the other?

I suppose I am a person with many sides for better or for worse, I can’t really tell… But you know, when it comes to making art I’m a firm believer you gotta just go for the feeling that’s closest to you in that exact moment in your life. At times I’ve had a lot to say and felt the best way to manifest those words and feelings was to put it into a fairly simple singing songwriting style. At other periods what worked for me was to just let the instruments do the talking and enjoy the process of bending sound into an encompassing landscape that I feel best portrays my latest phase. I’m not sure I’m attached to one style more than the other but they both hold different meanings to me and each carries a particular set of challenges that I very much enjoy navigating.

I’m always fascinated by the way art arrives to an artist. The mechanics of starting something and seeing it through to its final form. What comes first, what triggers everything else. Could you talk a little of the process in your experience? Curiosity and exploration feel so inherent to the LM sound that the question feels all the more interesting. How do you build something which feels like it is unfurling in real time?

Mmmm, yes, yes… Well, I think when it comes to creating art I always approach it free-style. I almost never have a plan at first. I’ll start with a thought or an image or memory and just see what comes from it with whatever I’m holding in my hand. Then when it starts to grow I get excited and jump up in my seat and say “Ooo! This is fun!” and then I let it all just build from there. I’d say at that point most of the song or painting or poem just creates itself, I’m merely a little vessel for its delivery. When it’s about 90% complete I come back to it and try to wrangle the tangles into something cohesive and understand its direction. I’ve always maintained the belief that making music is a collaboration with the universe just as much as its current state of principles. I think what I mean by that is, I can’t really take much credit for anything I create, maybe just 15% or so? I owe it all to the movement and stillness between the characters and scenery and gravity and trinkets on the trinket shelf. Like I said, I’m just a voluntary vessel.

Collected Streams gathers work written across a sizeable period, and I’m interested in your relationship to the various songs. Do the older track feel distinctly different to the newer ones? Does your most recent work always feel the most familiar, the most inherently you, or are such things not so simple to explain?

Oh dear. Well, everything feels different for sure but the beautiful thing about creating art is that each piece is a perfect snapshot of where I was at when I created it. A very detailed page from an honest diary, I can smell the sweet potatoes simmering on the cast iron or perfectly see the smile on a friend’s face while he rides a dirtbike in the back yard or the way it felt to really know someone deeply even if only momentarily and just play with stillness in the middle of nowhere inside a rental car. When I listen to a song I’ve made it’s a visceral experience of perfectly reliving my state of mind when it was created.

The balance between the physical and metaphysical is a striking aspect of your work. Songs clearly rooted in physical details—be they of the landscape, persons, life itself—but also reaching beyond this in search of a more cosmic tone. As though to accumulate corporeal details with a certain order or intensity is to transcend them somehow. Where would you map your songs on the continuum between ‘real’ and spiritual? Is it even sensible to make such a distinction?

“Corporeal”. I like that word, I’ve never heard it before so I had to look it up. “Relating to a person’s body, especially as opposed to their spirit.” I don’t know that anything is more spiritual than real, but then again I don’t really know much about anything in particular. I’d say if I had to choose I would say my art creations are spiritual ballads for the cosmic abyss. In that maybe, all I’m doing is swimming in one of many physical planes projecting a voice into the unknown and carefully listening for an echo. I think you touched on an important element of my process, I’m always reaching, though that quest isn’t always linear and sure maybe it’s a little to follow. But the lines between the spirit world and what feels so tangibly visible is often very much lost in the moments of constructing a composition.

Could we talk a little about influences? Be it in terms of the music itself, the lyrics, or moods and themes more generally. Are there any songwriters, poets, artists etc. who stand out as having a significant impact on your own style?

This feels like the hardest question of all. That’s good though, I love a good challenge. Well, I think if we’re being real a big influence for my music and art will always be people. I love characters. Sometimes in the grocery store or out on a walk or at work or on a drive I’ll see someone and they’ll just really fill me to the brim with feelings and thoughts. I’ll write a little poem or take their photo. I’ll sit on the feeling they conjured within me and usually it’ll turn into something, someway, somehow. Maybe sometimes it’s someone I loved and I’ll close my eyes and lay on the floor and find them through a beam from my center and wander in the labyrinth until it’s time, time to turn all that reaching into something that can sit still in the sound field or word stew… Yah, know? Make it into art I guess.

My music tastes are so scattered, I don’t even know… but if I’m in the process of making a record I will solely listen to the works in progress. I’ll play a song I’m working on over and over for months, judging it’s every detail until it sits right in the balance of its concept.

What’s next for Loretta’s Museum? Do you have anything in the pipeline, or an idea of the direction you’d like to explore next?

I’d like to do an ultra marathon, so right now I’m just training for that. It’s my hope that in about a year and a half I can do a 100 mile race. I’m not sure what’s possible with the body I sit inside of but it feels good to explore my potential and try something a little different. I don’t have any recordings in progress at the moment, actually I think this is the longest I’ve gone in my adult life without creating music. I just spent the last year locked up behind T-Walls and razor wire, I think I just want to explore for a little while and take in the freedom. Maybe something will come but if I’ve learned anything in my years of creative pursuits, something forced just isn’t worth a damn. We are all little artists and there’s always a poem on our hand.

Collected Streams is out now via Furious Hooves and Frillimcaster Records Unlimited, including a vinyl edition which you can get along with the four previous records on cassette in one handy bundle. Half of all sales from the bundles are being donated to Trans Lifeline.

The post Loretta’s Museum – Interview appeared first on Various Small Flames.

We decided to expand things slightly this year, giving ourselves a chance to write a little something about the albums we wanted to cover but never got the opportunity. Albums which meant something to us at various points through 2021. The list was still incomplete, of course, and we were left with a big list of great songs from great records we didn’t get a chance to mention.

So here are some songs we really enjoyed in 2021. We hope you enjoy them too.

Arooj Aftab – Mohabbat

A take on a piece by Hafeez Hoshiarpuri, Aftab’s multilayered masterpiece is suffused with the patience, sadness and meditative inner wandering of Sufi devotional poetry.

Anjimile – Stranger

As fragile as sandstone, tougher than rock, ‘Stranger’ packages a nuanced assessment of identity as a folk pop hit of which Sufjan would be proud.

Bea Troxel – Getting Where

An empowered anthem for the introverted, slowly circling towards a more truthful self.

Ben Seretan – Cicada Waves 1

Measured and patient piano embedded within an organic field recording, ‘Cicada Waves 1’ plays like a slow day passing in all its quiet details, all its hidden weight.

The Bird Calls – Ritual Crash

With satellites falling from the sky and the burning underworld breaking the surface, ‘Ritual Crash’ presented the most tender, intimate end of the world you were likely to hear in the year of our Lord 2021.

Bria – Buffalo Ballet

Travel to Abilene, TX with this take on John Cale’s “European version of the Old West,” from an EP of covers that both subverts and celebrates country music.

BRNDA – Perfect World

Stable job, accolades, friendly dogs and affirmation. “You’re in the perfect world and doing ok,” sings Leah Gage, voice flat and sardonic as the track eventually tips sideways and falls into an unhinged sax outro.

Canary Room – Lake Effect

Bittersweet folk captured in its best setting, supported by warm lo-fi textures and an ambient embrace of birdsong.

Carson McHone – Hawks Don’t Share

The lid peeled off artistic collaboration, showing the tug of war tension underneath, as well as the lingering regret that results.

Daniel Davies – Spies

On streets as dark and foreboding as this, the question isn’t whether you are paranoid, but whether you are paranoid enough.

Doran – Old Moon

A new song cut from ancient cloth, like a small scrap torn from the drape of the heavens and earth and old moon itself.

Dusted – Not Offering

“I have given up. I’ve given enough,” Brian Borcherdt sings on this tender lesson in regret and letting go. “I was so sure. So it goes, I am not anymore.”

Etran de L’Aïr – Toubouk Ine Chihoussay

A suitably joyous number from Agadez’s premier wedding band, drawing you into its infectious momentum.

Fog Lake – jitterbug

A typically aching and overcast pop song from the master of them.

Frances Chang – eros the love creator dividing chaos

Cosmic spoken word which finds universes within interiors, a daydream transportation away from these sorry lands.

Fust – The Last Days

A song for hard times made warm by the fundamental fondness gained only through shared suffering.

JOHN – A Military Alphabet (five eyes all blind) / Job’s Lament / First of the Last Glaciers / where we break how we shine (ROCKETS FOR MARY)

Some latent thing awoken by our way of living, rising in the name of revenge.

Heka – (a) wall

Anger simmered down to a velvety caramel, coating the tongue on a slow walk through nocturnal alleys.

Hilary Woods – I

One of Hilary Wood’s wordless hymns, to be sung in dark chapels deep underground.

illuminati hotties – Pool Hopping

Working on the logic that slowing down might equal admitting truths or figuring things out, ‘Pool Hopping’ grabs you by the hand and runs.

Indigo De Souza – Pretty Pictures

“I’m always trying to embody a balance between the existential weight and the overflowing sense of love I feel in the world,” Indigo De Souza explains, capturing the bummed-out brightness better than we ever could.

Johanna Samuels – Sonny

With its long shadows and golden light, it’s not clear whether the sun is dawning or setting on ‘Sonny’, but it heralds a new day nonetheless.

JOHN (TIMESTWO) – Return to Capital / Šibensko Powerhouse

The reek of ozone as thunderheads slowly gather / The unleashing of the storm. “I see an opening in the sky, high, wide.”

Keith Secola – Intaglio

Just one of the portals on Keith Secola’s latest record. Looking to the heavens, rooted to the ground, tied to everything in between.

Lael Neale – Blue Vein

“Guardian angel / Gather my losses / Keep them all safe / ‘Til I come to my cross”

Le Ren – Dyan

As warm as a mother’s hand, with all the clarity of an empty room.

Lewsberg – The Corner

Perfectly minimal, just guitar, percussion, and incense-scented violin. All backed up by monologue-like vocals that ring with pure patience.

Loretta’s Museum – The Rodney Ave Garage Sale

Instrumental folk and the ambient sounds of a garage sale combine to evoke one of those perfect glittery springtime days when the sky is blue and the leaves are green and the sun isn’t yet too hot to bear.

Lucie, Too – スーパームーン Super moon

A slice of big, radio-ready indie pop from a Japanese duo that seem destined to blow up.

Mal Devisa – Deja playing guitar

With slow guitar and lilting rhythm, a track which isolates the tenderness and patience within loneliness, yearning for connection with plainspoken charm

Marie/Lepanto – Gramps and Grandma

Justin Peter Kinkel-Schuster on reliably emotive form with the picture of familial love and heartbreak, and Jason Isbell shows up to shred some guitar for good measure.

Maxine Funke – Quiet Shore

A quiet meditation on the mundane aspects of a traumatic moment (a tea tray, a snatched umbrella, a slammed door) that illustrates the potency of memory and how a whisper is often louder than a shout.

Merpire – Heavy Feeling

Has an anxiety attack ever felt so cathartic?

Midwife – God is a Cop

“Am I heartless, or am I soft?” The pressing question at the heart of a track suspended between earnest confession and violent conflagration.

Myriam Gendron – Poor Girl Blues

Gendron combines a traditional Québecois folk song with an old blues one to distil their shared meaning, a lament for the lost, lonely and displaced.

Ovlov – Baby Shea

A 97 second eulogy to Brooklyn’s Shea Stadium played at breakneck pace.

Quivers – Gutters of Love

Ageless Aussie pop that’s a little bit 80s, a little bit 2010s, and a whole lot of joyous reassurance that heartbreak passes and things will be just fine.

Reiko and Tori Kudo – The Deep Valley of Shadow

A soft soliloquy on isolation grows quietly unsettling as warped strings whisper at the edges like anxious thoughts.

Sand Duney – Shadow Outside

Ramshackle country-tinged psych pop built on layered backing tracks thats equal parts meditative and energetic.

Space Mountain – Night Sky

A slacker jam.

Spread Joy – Kanst Du

Just one no wave pop nugget from a record that’s full of them, like pulling a weird sweet and sour German candy from a bag of pick ‘n mix.

Talons’ – Vampire

Talons’ tackle the experience of living through the pandemic in typically raw fashion, centring on an anxiety dream of being maskless in ALDI “between the meat, the fake meat and the gluten-free.”

Tiny Deserts – Wild Mt. Thyme

This beautifully unfussy and intimate take on an old Scots/Irish folk song captures that uniquely summertime feeling where the slow sunny evenings feel at once sorrowful and jubilant.

Trace Mountains – Eyes on the Road

The sound of a late-night self-reckoning while flying down the highway

TV Priest – Lifesize

A slurred and snarling assault on the patriarchal “strongmen” of politics and culture.

Typhoon – We’re In It

A band known for orchestral maximalism hone things to a razor edge in this emotional gut-punch on isolation, drifting friendship and, ultimately, persisting.

Valley Palace – Patch

Sky-blue guitar pop washed in hazy nostalgia that will have you dreaming of summer.

Weakened Friends – Quitter

A very nineties marriage of confession and catharsis, confronting fears over life’s direction by attaching heart to sleeve and blazing on ahead.

World Record Winner – Pockets of Nature

An honest-to-goodness ode to the joy of rooting around in the dirt and leaf litter away from worries and cares.

Wormy – Hungry Ghost (feat. Samia)

A whirlwind tour through the banal and heartbreaking details of life, gathering enough momentum to convince yourself everything might just be alright.

Yellow Ostrich – Timothy

“What’s a man? I’m just as soft as I can be” sings Alex Schaaf on this rumination on connection and the fallacies of masculinity.

If you enjoyed anything on this list, you may also be interested in our list of albums we missed in 2021. And of course, there were lots of amazing songs that we did write about in the last year, so have a look back through our Reviews and Previews sections to find more.

The post Songs We Missed in 2021 appeared first on Various Small Flames.