Heidi Harris – In the Lee (2012)

When Heidi Harris makes music, everything seems simultaneously casual and careful. Her gestures, vocal or instrumental, seem as natural and organic as breathing, as though they were simply inevitable, but they also sound as deliberately positioned as jigsaw pieces. This effect is partly due to her approach to production, which focusses on the creation of an ambience above all else.
There is a very spatial sound to these recordings, with a very natural sounding reverb, but also an aleatory feel to much of the orchestration, which reinforces the sense of objects positioned in space. The result of this is that her recordings encode silence, in a way that most do not. Sure, when there’s no sound there’s no sound, but with the perfection of digital recording silence is often too complete to register as such, reading instead as an absence of playback.