Back To The Woodlands

Description

Written and recorded between 1972 and 1982 in western Oregon, Back to the Woodlands is an unreleased, nearly lost album by Ernest Hood, created around the same time as his nearly mythical album Neighborhoods. Restored and remastered by Freedom To Spend from the original tapes, Back to the Woodlands is a visionary blend of field recordings, zithers, and synthesizers that offers unprecedented depth of access to this singular artistic spirit. While Neighborhoods is a nostalgic opus defined by traces of human activity, Back to the Woodlands leaves the modern world behind, diving into Hood's love for nature. Recently discovered in his archives, the album significantly expands his concept of "musical cinematography," imaginatively triggering states of sensory memory from its zither and synthesizer melodies, interwoven with field recordings made in Oregon. If Neighborhoods is a retreat into the vaporous joys of a romantic past, Back to the Woodlands is an immersion into the timeless sanctuary of the natural world. In the twelve compositions of the album, the undulating instrumental harmonics—shifting from abstraction to playful melody—blend so seamlessly with the songs of birds, the bubbling of streams, and other environmental soundscapes that they often give the impression of having been recorded in the landscapes they whisper to. Back to the Woodlands carves out a form of ambient sound realism that draws consciousness toward its external environment as much as it does toward the internal.