A few years ago Soda Lite played one of his rare concerts in Melbourne, which of course I couldn't attend due to the distance. A friend at least sent me photos of this event (which of course I can't find on my hard drive right now) and a little later I came into contact with Alex Last via social media.
We exchanged ideas about his music, Discogs entries and my mixes.
Alex now lives in Tasmania and enjoys the added peace and quiet in his life. 2017 saw the release of the incredible “In Eco” (later in this program), his first album to move away from the vaporwave genre. Since then I've always been eagerly waiting for a new release, but Alex is basically a gardener at heart, a man of art and nature who approaches things with humility and slowness and is therefore not the fastest musician. Which I can understand, I feel the same way with my mixes. Albeit for different reasons. There's always something going on in life, and when the time comes, it's not the right moment.
“Aqua Solar Cura” is already 2 years old, released on Britt Brown's always wonderful Not Not Fun label, and here too, nature is not absent for a moment on the 10 tracks.
Available as Tape or MP3.
„Tasmania-based gardener and composer Alex Last aka Soda Lite specializes in an elusive, ethnographical mode of outer reaches ambient, alternately immersive and immaterial, uninhabited and uninhibited. Their latest collection, Aqua Solar Cura, is a meditation on “relationships to land,” triangulating its titular elements – water, sun, care – within a woozy, warbling palette of keys, haze, and field recordings. Trills of birds and the gurgling of creeks murmur from windswept peripheries; dawn light shimmers in dewdrops and emerald ponds. Each piece feels excerpted from a vaster ongoing ecosystem, teeming with lifeways and hidden cellular harmony.
Much of the source material, from commingling waterfowl to screeching Tasmanian Devils, was tracked at Trowunna, a progressive wildlife sanctuary that rehabilitates species to be returned to the wilderness – a prime expression of ‘cura.’ These tracks evoke a similarly protean harmony, panoramic and indivisible, suffused with the synergy of seasons and seedlings adrift on fragrant air. It’s music of reverie and regeneration, glimpsed mid-bloom, in league with the brave mysteries of nature unveiled.“
- midheaven-
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