Pearls & Smoke
Glossata (aka Emily Griffiths) is a 22 year old composer from Oxford, UK with a talent for creating ethereal looping ambient with touches of techno and experimental sounds. She started creating music from a very early age and has dabbled in several music projects, including her past moniker Alteria Percepsyne, with three releases on labels such as Silent Season and AY. Now arrives her debut album as Glossata, entitled Pearls & Smoke, released on her own label Moth Heaven Recordings.
My inspiration comes from lots of images in my head and smells; from incense, jasmine and other perfumes, oak, old forests, abandoned lighthouses, the moon's texture, lonely figures by cliffs, rain trickling against cabin windows, subtle colours like olive and gray, old English houses in the countryside with faded doors...
Pearls & Smoke is an engrossing and deep venture with tones of romanticism, lush ambient rhythms and dusty techno beats. A diverse range of influences can be heard across this album, such as Voigt-esque drones on “Tending the Isle of Lost Daughters”, looping piano melodies on “Deeply Evoked by the Stars” and ethereal pop vocals with dub-like beats on “Swallowed Up in an Unalterable Dream”. It has been described as experimental, hauntingly unique and in some ways, very surprising.
From February 26th, the album is available to order as both CD and digital format from the Glossata Bandcamp page (link below).
I loved the album and her other ones too!
But I know why I love them so much, besides the mood and style of the techno she has built. Its because she sampled what is maybe my favorite music of all time, the Silent Hill OST’s, and 80% of all the samples she used of the OST’s comes from Silent Hill 2 OST, my favorite game of all time. So now I am a little disappointed because of that, I mean, I would be totally Ok if she just used the same samples that Akira Yamaoka used in the OST’s, but you clearly can hear she is sampling right from the original songs, which IMO is not original/ethical. If she gave this album for free (like her last one) then this would not be a problem, but since she is selling it with a fixed amount of profit with the original work of other musician then that’s not good.