KATIE BROWN - 9 NOV 2021

New ambient album The Last Garden by Aotearoa act Birds Of Passage, aka Alicia Merz, is hauntingly exquisite. With gentle vocals adding form to layered textures and drones, Alicia crafts hugely cavernous sonic worlds where the listener floats like a disembodied being in the ether, held by a darkness that is strangely soothing. Released through Denovali, The Last Garden is Alicia’s fifth album as Birds Of Passage and sees her turn once more to her solo work after a three-year hiatus.

The Last Garden is a body of work with a deep existential ebb and flow. Sorrow and grief are countered by a kind of quiet, fragile peace and resignation - almost a ‘que será, será’ - that can only grow from pain. Vast, immersive and glacial, it’s like a dark night sky dusted over with tiny pinpricks of light. Reverb-drenched opening track “It’s Too Late” introduces the first sense of this in its eerie lullaby-like resignation, and this is carried through into the sparse “The Light Became”, where the only instrumentation accompanying the vocals is a music box-like bell sound, lending an air of melancholic reverie to the track. In its mesmerising two—chord oscillation, “Find Me Another” mimics the same ebb-and-flow theme with its oxygen machine-reminscent sound effects, introducing the idea of mortality and what really brings life and death. Similar ideas sweep through the beautiful and goosebump-inducing “A Tale of Two Cities” and the icily galactic “Petite Mort”.

A clever use of distortion dirties up the smoother hypnotic textures of the drones throughout the album, like a reminder of the searing, rending-apart pain of heartbreak (“On Our Hands”, “We Fell for the Devil to Rise”). “On Our Hands” begins with simple acoustic guitar backing Alicia’s whispered vocals as she sings, “No-one likes a sad song”, but a textural ambience hovers disturbingly in the background as the lyrics change to “We got a tree in our garden and a fish in our pond”. Suddenly these textures rise up and take over in a jagged-toothed distortion throughout the end of the song, as if to shatter the illusion of any sort of domestic idyll, and the resulting dissonance forms the finale to the album, summing up its thematic dichotomy to perfection.

Alicia’s work within the ambient realm has a characteristic and sensibility that is especially unique. Truly mastering the creation of cinematic soundscapes, she threads her stories as convincingly through her instrumentation as through her lyrics, and the result is a kind of dystopian aural world where life’s experiences are addressed through a lens of melancholic and mystical beauty. Leaning more towards the melancholy, The Last Garden is desolate and tinged with the darkness of life’s winter, but in its fragile beauty it still holds the promise of a returning flow to contrast the weariness of the ebb.

Discover more of Alicia’s music as part of Lumo Morte with Canada-based brother Bruno Merz here.

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