Gwilym Gold - Blue Garden (2022) Hi Res

Songwriter and multi-disciplinary musician Gwilym Gold returns with album Blue Garden, a collection of tender, allegorical songs written, recorded and produced by Gwilym himself.

Blue Garden is Gwilym’s first collection written and recorded entirely in solitude and he hoped to unburden the process of anything beyond the most primary elements. Setting up a sort of hybrid harp in a small isolated room, the aim was to let the songs flow out unadorned and record them as they were. The only addition to the album is the accompanying sound of rivers and birdsong by sound recordist and founding member of Cabaret Voltaire, Chris Watson. Gwilym started to play the new album alongside Watson’s recording ‘The Drinking Boy’ which led him to reach out to Watson. Gwilym explains “I played it to a friend once I had recorded it with Chris’ field recordings, they said it almost sounded like the quarantine birds, there was a feeling of it being a little sanctuary”.

The songs on Blue Garden were written during a bittersweet time, where Gold was experiencing moments of love, loss and rebirth. The album is a loose and abstract exploration of love in all its forms, how familial, platonic and romantic love are all intertwined.

The artwork and visuals that accompany the record are created by artist Colin Henderson who used generative machine learning (a GAN) to generate uncanny, elusive imagery that alludes to birds and flowers but never quite alights on anything graspable.