Hollan Holmes - Emerald Waters (2022)

Hollan Holmes’s second album for Spotted Peccary, Emerald Waters, is an electronic paean to the sea. Inspired by the beauty, power and importance of water, Emerald Waters is both calm and dynamic. Here, a plethora of synthesizers ebb and flow around each other like shifting tides in a sonic mix of Berlin School sequences, traditional melodic structures and emotional chord progressions—all infused into enchanting electronic landscapes.

Using creative sound palettes like the Spectrasonics Omnisphere and Valhalla DSP Space Modulator, Emerald Waters paints natural splendor in cosmic tones. “The River” like its namesake, is both restless and restful. A rippling sequencer entwines with a triumphant bassline to capture the constant motion of the current while a spritely melody evokes fractals of sunlight scattering across water. In another track, “Leviathan” is an ascent from the depths; first, a rumbling like a storm on the ocean floor, and then a swirling arpeggiation uncoils and rises, yielding an airy melody that gives a glimpse of the surface. Such is the nature of Holmes’s inspiration where even flowing water through arid lands suggest a deep, imaginative experience that explores a universe of spatially evocative sound.

One fleeting moment inspired Emerald Waters: as Holmes, while driving across a bridge in Del Rio, Texas with his father, was suddenly transfixed by the creek below. He recalls: “The water was gin-clear and possessed all the colors of the blue and green spectrum. It was overwhelmingly beautiful. That ten seconds stuck with me my entire life.” Holmes—who has since developed a reputation as a serious fine artist, visually and musically—has reconnected to that same creek and the watery mystery it implied, summoning forth a life-long sense of its power and significance, both in his life and ours. Emerald Waters celebrates water, the greatest natural resource on our planet, for all its necessity and majesty.