Soda Lite - Aqua Solar Cura (2022)

Tasmania-based gardener and composer Alex Last aka Soda Lite specializes in an elusive, ethnographical mode of outer reaches ambient, alternately immersive and immaterial, uninhabited and uninhibited. Their latest collection, Aqua Solar Cura, is a meditation on “relationships to land,” triangulating its titular elements – water, sun, care – within a woozy, warbling palette of keys, haze, and field recordings. Trills of birds and the gurgling of creeks murmur from windswept peripheries; dawn light shimmers in dewdrops and emerald ponds. Each piece feels excerpted from a vaster ongoing ecosystem, teeming with lifeways and hidden cellular harmony.

Much of the source material, from commingling waterfowl to screeching Tasmanian Devils, was tracked at Trowunna, a progressive wildlife sanctuary that rehabilitates species to be returned to the wilderness – a prime expression of ‘cura.’ Together these tracks evoke a protean harmony, panoramic and indivisible, suffused with the synergy of seasons and seedlings adrift on fragrant air. It’s music of reverie and regeneration, glimpsed mid-bloom, in league with the brave mysteries of nature unveiled.