From Gardens Where We Feel Secure is the debut album by English musician Virginia Astley, released on 29 July 1983 on Astley's own label Happy Valley Records and distributed by Rough Trade Records.
The album is a predominantly instrumental collection of tone poems that describe the cycle and mirror the moods of a summer day. It is notable for its structure, moving from dawn to dusk, and its use of natural sound effects, over which Astley and co-producer Russell Webb recorded their own playing.
Background and recording
While concurrently working on a more song-oriented album, Virginia Astley conceived From Gardens Where We Feel Secure as a separate instrumental project which she intended to evoke the feeling of a summer day.[1] Astley later explained that she had not originally pictured it as her debut album, and recorded it "as a side project" because she "decided it would be nice to do something about summer".[2] From April to June 1982, Astley and her co-producer Russell Webb made various trips to the Moulsford and South Stoke countrysides to make field recordings using a portable Uher tape machine, capturing an assortment of natural sounds. Working in Astley's father Edwin's home studio in Moulsford, Astley and Webb recorded music – the former on piano and flute, and the latter on acoustic and electric guitar – over their field recordings, and used tape manipulation to achieve desired effects and speeds. Astley's nieces Emma Townshend and Aminta Townshend provided additional backing vocals, while Jo Wells of Kissing the Pink played clarinet on the track "Hiding in the Ha-Ha".[1]
A largely instrumental work, From Gardens Where We Feel Secure has been described as an album of pastoralambient music.[3][4] Its tracks are tone poems that collectively evoke the progression of a summer day from dawn to dusk, with the album being divided into two sections, "Morning" and "Afternoon".[4] Astley's compositions also drew inspiration from specific sources; the album, its title track, and the track "Out on the Lawn I Lie in Bed" were named after lines from the W. H. Auden poem "A Summer Night", while "When the Fields Were Burning" was inspired by Astley's mother's recollection of a dream in which firemen extinguished a blaze caused by stubble burning.[1]
Release
After a planned release on Zoo Records fell through, Astley shopped From Gardens Where We Feel Secure to the record label WEA, who showed interest but wanted Astley to re-record the album for release, which "would have been a daunting task due to the tape effects used." As a result, Astley instead opted to release the album on her own label Happy Valley Records, licensing the album to Rough Trade Records for distribution.[1] Released on 29 July 1983,[1]From Gardens Where We Feel Secure peaked at number four on the UK Independent Albums chart.[5] Two of the album's tracks, "A Summer Long Since Past" and "It's Too Hot to Sleep", had previously been issued in January 1983 on the 12-inch edition of Astley's single "Love's a Lonely Place to Be",[6] while "When the Fields Were on Fire" had appeared on Meridians 2, a compilation issued by the Touch label in May 1983.[1][7]
Astley later re-recorded the track "A Summer Long Since Past" for her 1986 album Hope in a Darkened Heart.[8] On 29 September 2003, a remasteredCD reissue of From Gardens Where We Feel Secure was released by Happy Valley and Rough Trade.[9] As the original cover artwork had since been lost, a new cover was designed for the reissue based on a brief by Astley.[9] The cover shows a photograph of Cowleaze Wood, a 70-acre woodland in the Chiltern Hills of England, covered in bluebells.
In a glowing review for Smash Hits, critic Peter Martin called From Gardens Where We Feel Secure "a diary of sounds" that "evokes a perfect childhood well spent in the heart of a green and pleasant land", and "recaptures the purity of innocence and is sheer bliss."[13] Paul Bursche described it in Number One as a "dreamy and pastoral" album where "piano, flute and clarinet lovingly combine to give aural pictures of a relaxed countryside."[10] Writing that it "has absolutely nothing to do with any pop trend past or present, simply being one person's exploration of a temporary mood and ambience", Record Mirror's Jim Reid concluded that "if this is a marginal work, well away from the Top 20 racks of your local record store it is still worthy of inspection. At times Virginia's tenuous grasp at permanence is quite beautiful."[12] Mick Sinclair from Sounds posited that "for all its guise of rural quietness this, to me, makes some kind of inverted comment on the urban landscape", observing a "latent power" behind the music's "mask of tranquility and 'softness'".[14]
Retrospectively, AllMusic reviewer Stewart Mason praised From Gardens Where We Feel Secure as "a lovely 35-minute meditation" and Astley as "no mere ambient noodler", adding that the album's songs "are melodically rich and varied; mood pieces in the truest sense of the term."[3] Noting that its "peacefulness went much against the general grain in 1983", Uncut's Marcello Carlin deemed it a "quietly influential" record which "seemed to be as back-to-basics as Billy Bragg (albeit in a different way), but in reality was as futuristic as the Art of Noise."[15] Writing for Pitchfork, Simon Reynolds opined that "no one else on the UK indie scene at that time made a record as beguilingly bucolic as Gardens", which he placed within "a centuries-old tradition of rhapsodic pastoralism in British culture", finding that "Astley's music taps into that zone where idyllic personal memory bleeds into collective nostalgia: mythic notions of England as Arcadia."[4] In 2018, Pitchfork listed it as the 147th-best album of the 1980s, with staff writer Matthew Schnipper calling it "an inimitable album of ambient music" whose "feeling is both ancient and eternal—many worlds away from our fast-moving, digital era."[16]
Track listing
All tracks are written by Virginia Astley.
Side one ("Morning")
"With My Eyes Wide Open I'm Dreaming" – 5:43
"A Summer Long Since Past" – 4:36
"From Gardens Where We Feel Secure" – 3:59
"Hiding in the Ha-Ha" – 3:55
Side two ("Afternoon")
"Out on the Lawn I Lie in Bed" – 5:09
"Too Bright for Peacocks" – 2:29
"Summer of Their Dreams" – 3:21
"When the Fields Were on Fire" – 3:25
"It's Too Hot to Sleep" – 5:18
Personnel
Credits are adapted from the album's liner notes.[17]
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