K. Leimer - Music for Land and Water (2022)

It would be a big mistake to pass off Kerry Leimer’s 1983 tape ‘Music For Land And Water’ as simply ‘new age’. Certainly in its slow-burning beauty and near blissful mood there are similarities between Leimer’s work and the then-popular new age movement, but ‘Music For Land And Water’ is far more complex than you might expect. The music is stated as having been ‘produced specifically for performance and installation’, and this was achieved by a system of looping tape players shifting naturally with the music itself. This system is not unlike that which Eno pioneered on his early ambient records, and here works with Leimer’s compositions in perfect harmony. The sense of slowly-evolving, floating calm is made all the more enjoyable by the saturated tape sounds (now gloriously remastered by Autumn boss Greg Davis) and while Eno might be the primary reference point, I can even hear the sickly drum machines and synth work of early electro pop in ‘Go Slowly’. A clear highlight is the utterly gorgeous ‘Very Tired’, which pitches molasses-slow synthesizer pads against echoing guitar and electric piano, giving an early blueprint for Harold Budd, and more recently Rameses III. Utterly gorgeous and somehow out-of-time entirely, ‘Music For Land And Water’ is an unmissable vault discovery. Don’t sleep on this one, sleep alongside it.