The cat walks through the snow. Is it her garden?
Teahouse Radio is a project of Pär Boström, whom you may know better as Kammarheit or Cities Last Broadcast. On this album his ambient is less dark, though still a bit darker than I expected, given the name.
The stroll through the quiet garden, while tranquil, is not always a light affair. Somber thoughts sometime intrude, about death, the forces that shape our world, the fallibilities of the living…
Her Quiet Garden is minimalist, meditative, the right amount of ambient sound to calmly set your mind adrift. Plucked strings emerge from more abstract waves and sink back again. Just so, we allow our thoughts to surface, speak themselves, and submerge again.
Meanwhile, the cat senses something moving under the snow. Her tiny ears and paws twitch in anticipation. Meanwhile, does she know what we are thinking? Whose memories are buried in this garden? Whose urn is standing silently in its proper place? Or is she blissfully ignorant of all that, as we tend to think cats are?
Would that we could always be somewhere in between the garden, the cat, and us.
She pounces.