Earlier this year, Myles O’Reilly released Cocooning Heart, which Thomas Blake described as a singularly fulfilling album. As he noted in his review – Sometimes art floats close to the surface of real life. It isn’t always comfortable, and it must take a certain amount of courage to create. Having previously released a minimal ambient series of long players ‘Cabin Lights Off’ (2020) and ‘My Mother’s Star’ (2021), Myles has today announced An Ode To Soft Landings, a third instalment set for release on 8th November (pre-order here).
It’s described as a meditation on the elementary ethereal sound of hazy drones, lush reverb, delicate synth and guitar loops. A journey into memory and nostalgia, where most of our experiences remain inside us as fragmented echoes. Mysterious and melancholy slow-swelling strings. Submarine tones, subtle and frail.
He has just shared a video for the lead track Her First Crios in which we hear the ambient sounds of daily life taking place in the home of Myles and his wife Aideen. She is busy setting up her weaving loom while their cat warms itself on an armchair by a wood fire. This is slow music of the most beautiful kind, even though there is no verbal communication, Myles, Aideen and the cat are each in their own space, each in their own unique moment of existence, yet they each cross over in the warmth of shared companionship. It’s a moment in time that you don’t want to pass…Here’s to lingering longer and slowing down…
“A ‘Crios’, pronounced ‘Kriss’ is a type of hand woven waist belt that was commonly worn in Ireland for many thousands of years. Sadly during British occupation, they were banned, and the tradition died out. Each Irish family would have had their own unique pattern. Knowledge of how to weave the family Crios would have been handed down from generation to generation.
Christmas 2021 for my wife Aideen and I was bit rough. We both had Covid. Thankfully my present to Aideen was a small weaving loom. She had only recently joined The Liberties Weavers, a local organisation dedicated to reviving some of inner city Dublin’s old weaving traditions. Where we live in Dublin 8 was, for hundreds of years, the weaving mecca of the country. It’s here that Aideen learned of the Crios and how to make one.
This film is a document of how we spend a lot of our days at home. I’m making music upstairs and Aideen is weaving downstairs. The cats look on. It details the exact process we both go through in practising our new found crafts.
The song I’m playing titled ‘Her First Crios’ is the current ambient manifestation of a song ‘The Most Colourful Thread In The Loom’ from the album I released earlier this year. It is what the tune has evolved into now. The emotions from that song, dedicated to Aideen and her weaving, put under the microscope. A deeper and totally instrumental dive in to those feelings, moulded from the same intentions.”
Pre-Order the album: https://mylesoreilly.bandcamp.com/album/indistinct-chatter-an-ode-to-soft-landings