LUCY GOOCH – Desert Window – LP – White Vinyl [JUN 6]

LP – Limited Standard Edition White Vinyl with DL Card.

On her debut album, Lucy Gooch stays true to her electronic foundations, while incorporating more acoustic instrumentation and digging deeper into her folk roots through songwriting. But at the heart of Lucys music is her rapturous vocal, with which she has experimented more than ever over the course of her first full-length.

Many of the pieces on Desert Window started out as vocal improvisations from which she pulled a narrative. Taking cues from the incantatory chanting found in middle English poetry such as The Names of the Hare, as well as the prescient imagery in contemporary works like The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington (1974). To a larger extent, this became an experiment in placing my voice in a more narrative way, while remaining oblique, Gooch explains.

While her previous work could be compared to drawn-out landscapes punctuated with moments of romance and radiance, this album feels grounded in materiality and the everyday. Goochs voice is at times strident, while elsewhere restrained and broken. I lost connection to my voice and then had to rediscover it, which was exhilarating. There were these bursts of energy where Id be messing around and occasionally stumble upon something. There are hushed melodies and exhausted squalls, creating dissonance and space.

The result is an atmospheric balance between Kate Bush and Cocteau Twins harmonies, Vangelis major chords, and a juxtaposition of folk ambience reminiscent of the offset madrigals of The Third Ear Band and Italian cult film composers Goblin. It is a complex and elegant album, an all-consuming series of songs that reach into jazz, electronica and classical song construction.

An unusually developed aesthetic vision, one that joins the atmospheric quality of ambient music with the structure of choral composition and the seeming effortlessness of pop.
Pitchfork – Best Electronic Music of 2021

Organ-toned synthesizer chords, distant church bells and countless choirlike overdubbed harmonies. It evolves from meditation to an open-ended quasi-confession – New York Times

The moment is short, but Lucy Goochs music makes it last forever – NPR

Prismatic synth thickets impose, yet seem to quake at the same time, as if reflecting the fragility of the polar ice caps – The Guardian

“Expansive, upfront, spectral pop” – KEXP

Tracklist:

Side A
A1. Like Clay
A2. Night Window (Part One)
A3. Night Window (Part Two)
A4. Keep Pulling Me In

Side B
B1. Jack Hare
B2. Clouds
B3. Our Relativity
B4. Desert Window