People forget this these days, when ambient instrumental music tends to be disdainfully lumped in the "new age" bin and forgotten (and rightfully so, since much of it is genuinely awful), but in the late '70s and early '80s, this type of music was considered positively cutting-edge. It wasn't, of course -- see "Satie, Erik" -- but after Eno's early experiments in ambient music, many interesting post-post-punk albums (almost all of them in the UK and northern Europe) included those influences. One of my favorites is Virginia Astley's 1981 album From Gardens Where We Feel Secure.



The daughter of British film composer Edwin Astley, Astley was all but unknown when she recorded this album, having only been part of the never-recorded cult trio the Ravishing Beauties (whose other two members, Kate St. John and Nicky Holland, went to some success as members of the Dream Academy and Tears For Fears, respectively, plus Nicky did a couple of pretty good AAA solo records) and doing some session work with her brother-in-law, some dude named Pete Townshend. That's Virginia's piano all over "Slit Skirts," for example. Supposedly originally written as demos for the Ravishing Beauties, the 10 songs on From Gardens Where We Feel Secure are piano solos with occasional woodwinds, backed with tapes of the sounds of the pastoral English countryside. "It's Too Hot To Sleep" is the closing song, fading out to the sound of insects cheeping through the night. Astley's classical training (and, perhaps, her father's cinematic influence) is obvious here: it's subtle, but there's a logical progression to this tune as opposed to the aimless meandering that so many similar records feature. Astley has maintained an extremely low-key career since her brief moment in the British indie spotlight, but this remains by far my favorite of her albums.

-Stewart Mason