In composing radiant new-age music inspired by plants, the Los Angeles-based musician encourages a sense of empathy with nonhuman life.
Asimple, open sense of awe suffuses the music Olive Ardizoni makes as Green-House. Their debut record under that alias, the calming, contemplative Six Songs for Invisible Gardens, came out in early 2020 via the Los Angeles label Leaving, a longtime home for music with a spiritual slant and a reverent embrace of nature. Like Mort Garson’s 1976 cult classic Mother Earth’s Plantasia, the first Green-House release took plants and their caretakers as its intended audience. Ardizoni similarly followed Stevie Wonder’s mesmerizing 1979 score Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants in mapping the behaviors of flora onto synthesized compositions, trying to imagine what kind of musical patterns plants might like to hear—or, conversely, what kind of rhythms and melodies might induce in people the opportunity to empathize somatically with their still, unspeaking neighbors.
Ardizoni’s second release as Green-House, Music for Living Spaces, sustains their fascination with nonhuman life. Songs like “Royal Fern,” “Nocturnal Bloom,” and “Sunflower Dance” imbue their subjects with a sense of animist agency, using melody as a vehicle for imagining the interiority of an organism without a central nervous system. To Ardizoni, plants and wildlife don’t merely supply the backdrop to human activity; they are deeply entwined with our species, and available to commune with us should we grant them the opportunity. The world rendered in these songs is not the setting of any one protagonist’s arc, nor does it exist merely to support the narrative of humanity as a whole. It’s a tightly woven mesh of interconnected movement in which we as people are lucky enough to find ourselves tangled.
The soft triumphs of Music for Living Spaces make it easy to see reality on this scale. This album furthers the palette and techniques of Six Songs, relying largely on the pearly tones of simple synthesis: pure sine waves; simulated horns and woodwinds that make no bid for realism; the compressed peal of a xylophone dreamed up inside a computer, untethered from mallet or key. Some tones, like the one playing out a countermelody on “Sunflower Dance,” beep like scientific instruments steadfastly recording data. Ardizoni keeps their melodies unhurried, sticking largely to placid tempos. In this world, there’s no anxiety and no rush. The music invites diffuse attention across its entire field; Ardizoni doesn’t designate particular sounds as leads and accompaniment so much as they let dynamic and static melodies mutually support each other, giving each equal weight in an abundant expanse.
One of Ardizoni’s greatest strengths as a composer is their sense of pacing: the patience to let the natural arc of the work emerge over time. Close to the end of the album, they introduce their singing voice into the mix for the first time on a Green-House project, and the music suddenly blooms. Like their synthesizers, their voice suspends melody with a gentle, oblique touch. When they repeat the title of the song “Rain,” their voice is layered and processed such that it finds kin, not contrast, with its electronic environment. It’s like the clouds have opened up and a ray of sun has drawn out the full colors of the scene, warming it through the lingering dew. “I follow the wind/And I fly home,” Ardizoni sings on “Find Home,” their clear voice flowing into a stream of pristine synthesized sound. This world is already their home; all they have to do ease into its path.
The album’s title suggests that this music is intended to be played in rooms where people carry out their daily lives, rooms people keep clean and decorate to maximize their pleasure and productivity. But it also gestures to the idea that on Earth, there is no such thing as an unliving space. Music can play wherever there’s air; wherever there’s air, something is striving, growing, resisting entropy to take on new and astonishing shapes. Green-House’s music invites you to consider yourself not as an isolated subject clawing against an antagonistic world, but as an organism among organisms, a locus of growth and becoming, unweighted by directive beyond the urge to keep living.
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