Anyone who manages not to think of cloud storage when reading the title of Emily A. Sprague’s new album deserves credit. The musician — who also sings in the band Florist — seems to have her head in real clouds this time, and she wants to take her listeners there too. Cloud Time documents Sprague’s first tour of Japan in autumn 2024, with each track named after one of its stops.
Where her earlier ambient work, often shaped by acoustic elements such as piano tones, had a hazy yet intimate directness, Sprague now relies mainly on synthesisers — clearer on one hand, more detached on the other. The sonic space opens up without lapsing into the cliché of reverb-saturated drift. She keeps her palette deliberately narrow and allows, as in »Matsumoto«, strange, high-pitched sounds to pierce the slowly evolving weave.
The music keeps shifting: at times denser, then dissolving as the sounds intertwine, connect, and gradually fade to make way for new ones. Up there, the mind can feel entirely at home.
Cloud Time
