Reference Points: Emily A. Sprague

In botanical terms, a graft is neither one plant nor exactly two. The process of combining a sturdy rootstock with a cutting from another plant to help it grow dates back to ancient Greece, where it was used to propagate fruit trees and canonise a favoured taste or shape. But, to quote cinema’s most objectified mathematician, life (uh) finds a way, and sometimes what grows instead is a curious third thing, a graft chimera, like the wonderful bizzarria, a Florentine fruit tree that bears both sour oranges and citrons, and something in between.There’s something chimeric about Cyano, too. Emily A. Sprague’s newest work doesn’t fall fully into the realms of the experimental practice of her ambient albums like Water Memory, Mount Vision, or Hill, Flower, Fog. Nor does it fit the melodic songwriting mould of her band Florist and their detailed, intimate folk songs. Those modes are recognisable here among the album’s patient, open-ended textures, but Cyano has its own discrete vocabulary too, expressed through modular synth work, voice, and field recordings from a winter solstice spent in rural Iceland. Sign up to Best Fit's Substack for regular dispatches from the world of pop culture Bo...