Emily A. Sprague: Cloud Time

The Florist singer/songwriter returns with a new collection of solo ambient synth improvisations recorded in Japan

Known to a wider audience as the singer and guitarist of indie folk band Florist, Emily A. Sprague has carved out a second career lane for herself as a solo ambient electronic artist over the last decade.

Growing up in the Catskill mountains in upstate New York, Sprague moved to Albany at an early age, dabbling in the city’s small but lively DIY scene. After relocating to Brooklyn in 2013, her band slowly but surely took off, releasing five acclaimed albums and developing a serious fan base around the world.

Emily was also an actual pioneer and driving force of the late 2010s ‘ambient boom’, releasing her first two modular synth-based solo albums Water Memory (2017) and Mount Vision (2018) at a time when that type of music wasn’t extremely fashionable or popular yet.

After focusing on her work with Florist and other projects for the last five years, she’s finally returning with Cloud Time, her fourth album released under her own name – a collection of improvised instrumental synthesizer pieces, edited down from hours of stage recordings from a recent Japan tour.

I spoke to Emily about finding music through skate- and snowboarding videos, why she didn’t release a solo album for five years, and why this visit to Japan was more than just a regular tour for her.

photo: V Haddad

Emily, what are some of your earliest memories of sound?

I’m an only child, and I grew up in a house right next to a creek. Behind the house, there was a bridge with a waterfall, so that ambient sound of the water running was always audible. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. That sound was present since I was a baby, so I’ve always felt connected to water.

In terms of music, my mother was a hospice nurse and a music therapist for people at the end of life, people with dementia and Alzheimer’s, so she was interested in calming, nostalgic music that can trigger memories. There was a lot of that kind of music being played at home. My dad was more the rock’n’roll guy, which maybe explains a little bit of my own duality there.

Did your parents play instruments as well?

My mom played piano and sang, and she played the flute and a mini harp and a little dulcimer kind of thing. My dad just sings a lot, walking around, or in the shower. He also introduced me to 1960s and 1970s music, the Beatles and stuff like that, which I really liked as a kid.

When did you start to get musical education?

I had guitar lessons for about two or three years, with a couple of gaps in between, from when I was 13 until I was 16, and that was how I learned about songwriting and basic theory, just a couple of scales and chords. I was into electric guitar first and learned how to play some guitar solos, but then I started to get more interested in acoustic guitar and folk music. My last guitar teacher encouraged me to come to the lesson with songs that I liked, and we would learn how to play them.

What was the type of music that you were actively seeking out as a teenager?

It actually came through skateboarding and snowboarding videos. I grew up right down the mountain from a ski mountain, and my dad’s job was in relation with the ski mountain, so he got passes for me and my mom. I snowboarded since I was five, and that culture was a big part of my life. Growing up, all my friends were skaters and snowboarders, and I was really into these videos, seeing the pro skaters choose what kind of music they want. Some had little segments cut in where they’re like painting or whatever, and I found that really cool.

So I remember hearing “Sleep Walk” by Santo & Johnny, this chill electric guitar duet, in this Toy Machine video. That was one of the first songs I got obsessed with. And then I started to seek out other strange, minimal, gentle music. I found out about Thom Yorke and Sigur Rós and artists like that, which were either featured in skate or snowboarding videos or on movie soundtracks. It was all very experimental, indie-adjacent stuff that you couldn’t find in the CD section at Best Buy.

That’s interesting. Skate videos have been formative in that sense for multiple generations by now, not just in terms of music. I grew up on them in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and they really shaped my aesthetic taste.

Yeah, I was speaking with a friend about this recently, specifically about how skateboarding videos can have the influence on a person who goes to become interested in art, or pursuing any kind of alternative path in life. It all really makes a lot of sense. It’s kind of anti-formal, anti-establishment… it’s so free and beautiful and really expressive. So I just recently resurfaced that memory of that being such a strong part of my life.

You grew up outdoors instead of online, and you’ve been writing in your newsletter about how you are trying to get back to that state.

I’m definitely trying to figure out if that’s possible. I’m 31, so I’m still young, but I didn’t have a computer or a phone until I was out of high school. A lot of the way that we relate to ourselves and to our world and to others comes from that time. It’s a presence within, like a slower string of time, a slower stretch of time versus now, where everything feels a lot more fragmented, and it’s almost like we’re adapting to that fragmentation, which is interesting in its own right, how we are just progressing down the line.

I really want to continue to grow and learn and participate in what’s happening in the world, and it’s tricky because so much of it is alive within this new world – I think of [the internet] as the new reality, the new world. But I crave the kinds of experiences that I remember growing up, and do seek them out, and try to center my creative practice in processes that are emulating that slower pace. Cloud Time is entirely about going back to this idea that life is passing us by, that moments are fleeting, and our presence is the only thing that matters, and our awareness of each other and our care for that space and time, just as it starts and ends, all in one instant.

I’m interested in trying to ground my art in those kinds of ideas. But obviously, the life that it takes on being shared is maybe a part of the other realm. It’s complicated, it’s about mourning it a little bit, and then also trying to embrace what we can about what’s coming. I try to stay positive about that as well.

photo: V Haddad

I’ve been following your solo work since Water Memory, which came out in December 2017. Tell me how that record came about, because that was a time when ambient music wasn’t as fashionable as it would become.

My interest in music has always also been in this ambient, instrumental, experimental world. I’ve been seeking out that stuff. I like songwriting, but whenever I was first recording little demos on cassette players, part of that process was having a little keyboard or a reverb pedal and making these atmospheric background tracks. It was just a matter of doing it without the song existing over top of it and that accompanied my practice of songwriting as well, just making these instrumental little pieces.

Before I released Water Memory, I had a different album of ambient instrumental music that I asked a label that I was friends with back in the day if they were interested in releasing it. This was at the very beginning of Florist, our first album had just come out. I was really excited about this and super nervous, because at that time, we weren’t getting flooded with tons of ambient electronic music. It hadn’t really had the revival in the same way as now, it was still all pretty underground. They ended up turning that down, so I did feel very unsure if anyone would in a million years want to listen to that kind of music. But I cared a lot about it, so I kept making it. Water Memory, at first, was just a self-release. It did feel super important to me and like a huge part of who I am and the musical language that I want to speak.

What were some of the inspirations for making that music back then?

I mean, the Eno stuff was always around. I had some of his records when I was a teenager. I was really into record collecting, and I think I had Ambient 3… I definitely knew about him and was interested in the ambient music philosophy. Though I had no idea yet about Kankyō Ongaku…

…the Japanese style of environmental music that saw a huge revival on YouTube around the same time…

I mean, I’d heard of Hiroshi Yoshimura before I released Water Memory, but not when I started writing the material. When I was making these compositions, I was doing deep dives on YouTube and trying to find any minimal electronic music. I found Yoshimura as the diving board into environmental music. Cloud Time is very much inspired by that philosophy. I think the quote is something like, “music that exists, like the air itself”, which to me is a very beautiful way of relating music to how life exists, and how we relate to each other and ourselves.

One of my favorite things about music is how accessible it is, and how it is a part of everyone’s life, and it has this profound effect on how we exist in spaces and in a moment. But when you exist in this commodified, commercial world of the music industry, a lot of it is not about that. Cloud Time was very much an attempt at making a music project that is conceptually more about music as something that contributes to our life as furniture.

I think we ought to be more considerate of how we share space with each other, whether that’s a room, or an emotional space, or the global space. By improvising live, I put myself in a vulnerable position – meeting a moment instead of trying to own it in a controlled sense. To take ownership over a space is something I don’t want to be promoting with music that is meant to make us more introspective.

The first three solo albums came out in a quick succession over the course of three years. What led to the five-year break before Cloud Time?

Well, I’ve been working on a few different projects, and in my personal life, in the year after Hill, Flower, Fog (2020) came out, I moved across the country from California back to New York, back to the town that I grew up in. My dad lives here by himself, and he’s in good health, but he’s in his 70s. Coming back to this place was a bit tricky, for all the memories that I left behind and hadn’t really had to face. I was focusing a lot of my energy and time on a different kind of creativity, starting a new home, making new roots.

I also had this realization that I just want to be really intentional about what I release. I’ve started to edit myself a little bit more, spend more time on projects, and take a little longer to go from that starting to releasing point, just to really make sure that what I’m sharing is something that I’m comfortable taking up that space in the world and on the internet.

photo: V Haddad

Cloud Time was mostly recorded on tour in Japan. I read that you changed your setup before the tour because you wanted more freedom, less control?

Yeah, exactly. I’ve made all of my previous albums with a modular synthesizer. Water Memory is all modular; Mount Vision is half modular, half sampling, but a lot of automatic processes, self-sustaining and self-sufficient in a certain way. For Cloud Time, the setup was a super minimal subtractive polyphonic synth with a keyboard and pedals, no presets, and I didn’t use any arpeggiating or sequencing. It’s a very basic synthesis and sound design instrument.

If you wanted to change the sound or make a new sound, you’d have to change the sliders for the oscillators, the filter and the envelope. The performance itself is 100% reliant on me physically touching the instrument and playing actual notes. That was an intentional decision. I wanted to bring something that I couldn’t just fall back on. If I fumbled or tripped a little bit, that would be a part of that whole idea. Arriving somewhere with this vulnerability, this effort to be present and to be really focusing on what that room is like.

Sounds scary.

It’s what being alive is like, right? We’re imperfect creatures. Nature does not want us to present ourselves in a way that has no flaws, and that has no room for error or humanness. I wanted that to be a part of the process of making this music that hopefully would come across in the music itself and reflect this journey of showing up and just seeing what happens.

That Japan tour in 2024 almost didn’t happen though, right?

Yeah, it was originally scheduled for February 2020 and then rescheduled multiple times for various reasons, first COVID, then visa issues.

But when we finally went, these were really beautiful shows in small little clubs, real labor of love kind of venues. One of them was underneath a bath house. One was very old, all kinds of crooked wood, maybe an old garage or workshop, and they made curry while everybody was settling in. It was really wholesome, warm and inviting. It inspired me so much to try and bring that kind of energy to my own communities back home and the spaces that I visit. Everyone that we met was very present and grateful that we were there, and very appreciative of everyone’s time and energy.

I’ve never been somewhere that an audience is so still, not just for one set, but for the entire three hour night. Even during the DJ sets before and after the show, they just stood there and listened to the music that someone had curated for them – people weren’t even talking. It was really about the experience of going and listening to music.

Going back to that blank sonic canvas – how did you start shaping up the music every night?

For me, it’s mostly about intuitive listening. I was just following the last thing I heard with the intuition that I have, just going to another note and the interval being the emotion. All the different intervals evoke a different kind of emotion, and it was mainly based on how I was feeling, which was changing throughout the set.

I would repeat something for a little while, and I had a pedal with an extremely long delay time, around 20 seconds which I could have it repeat without oscillating. So I could create these little pockets of melodies or intervals, notes that would loop, with this delay pedal, but it was such a long delay time that you don’t think of it as a repeating phrase. You’ve forgotten what you heard before, but then it does return in a way that is what our brain loves about music – a pattern.

There were some things that I brought back [in the next shows], little melodies that I ended up liking, and they became themes for the tour. So I didn’t play the same set by any means every night, but some things made appearances. I was switching between longer, droning sounds, and these almost electric piano-y shorter sounds, so there were many possibilities. And when you start layering the sounds, they do play off of each other.

Some artists have described that mental state during improvisation as a meditative flow state. Did you experience that as well?

Some nights I walked up, sat down and started playing, and before I knew it, an hour had passed, and I couldn’t tell you what happened. That’s that flow state, that’s what we hope is going to happen. But there were other performances – maybe I was feeling tired from travel, or my mood wasn’t as positive – and I was up there, thinking, “What am I doing? How do I do this?” That’s also part of this project, and I do feel good about sharing it.

I hear a lot of melancholy and reflection [in these recordings]. There is some fear and anxiety, but there’s some peace and happiness as well. There’s a push and pull with trying to be present and getting distracted. That feels important to include, because even in a meditation practice, that’s just what it is – that’s what it’s all about, right? The whole point is to encounter those things, so they should be acknowledged.

Emily A. Sprague’s Cloud Time is out now on RVNG Intl.