Nothing excites Virginia Astley more than the familiar comforts of home. Not on the underground circuit in the late 70s where he started out, playing pub gigs as part of a new-wave outfit Victims of pleasure. Nor the next post-punk wave, when he had the opportunity to record with such titans as Echo and the Bunnymen and Siouxsie and the Banshees. While on tour with the Teardrop Explodes in 1981, she played in a band called the Ravishing Beauties, contrasting the headlining band's psychedelic attack with her rich melodic sweeps and uniquely haunting vocals. The Beauties never released an album (although they did Record at John Peel's BBC studios), but the music they made together laid the foundations for the delicate soundscapes Astley would go on to explore in her solo career. Her debut album, 1983 From the gardens where we feel safeit came two years after the tour ended, with a title that makes clear her preference for solitude.
Gardens it was a work of pastoral theater that infused powerful woodwinds and strings with recordings from the riverside village of Moulsford-on-Thames, circling cattle and rushing streams in miniature dioramas of rustic life. It would remain the only record of its kind in Astley's catalog for four decades as it explored new modes of operation, incorporating song and poetry in her worlds. With her new album The spaces that sing, returns with another collection of field recordings and elegant acoustic arrangements. At last she revisits the verdant garden of her imagination.
Astley collected sounds for The spaces that sing in various locations around the upper reaches of the River Thames, which becomes more rural and sparsely populated the further it spreads from the hustle and bustle of the big cities. He said to one recent interview that often inspires her when she walks in the countryside. Walking along the Thames is like turning the clock back to centuries past. Church bells have been ringing for centuries. The rickety watermills creak as they turn. Astley's footsteps are occasionally heard treading on well-worn paths. There is a sense that she is fascinated by the history that surrounds her as she passes through locations untouched by industrialization and weathered by the passage of time.
