Los Angeles-based duo Green-House, creative collaborators, Olive Ardizoni and Michael Flanagan, have been labeled “Eco-Ambient”. Their first cassette, Music For Invisible Gardens, came with wild flower seeds for the listener to scatter. However, rather than passive, the pair’s stance is actually political. A peaceful protest. Concerned with not only our general squandering of the Earth’s resources, but also the need for urban folks to re-connect with, and experience, nature. Hence those seeds. The music on their second long-player, A Host For All Kinds Of Life, is a mix of cool calming “kankyo ongaku” and new age noodling. Slow, elastic, chimes, soothing sustained notes, and tumbling, tinkling sequences – pretty crystalline clusters like comets tails. A perfect unhurried soundtrack for the start of the day. To be taken whilst waking, stretching, yawing. At least for the moment, unhassled. Beatless, but gently rhythmic. Rubbing the sleep from your eyes. 

As the album progresses the compositions become less and less obviously electronic. Luna Clipper, like Adam Higton’s recent Cosmic Neighbourhood collection, could be a bit of BBC Radiophonic Workshop gear, destined, designed for `70s kids TV. On the other hand, something like Ferndell Shade would make a great a zen meditation tool. A shakuhachi’s raw, rasping song in with the singing, ringing, sine waves. 

The pieces evolve at a painstaking pace. Simple, but not simple enough to be merely mood-setting “BGM”. Uncluttered, but still too complex to be something by, say, Hiroshi Yoshimura. The synthetics are supplemented with flute, piano, classical cascades of other countering keys.The odd acoustic string. The odd echo of wooden percussion. There’s even some theremin. Plus many of the compositions have memorable themes and melodies. So they aren’t strictly ambient atmospheres. More these sort of soft, sighing, relaxed, romantic waltzes, and as such, struck me, as something intended to be shared, quietly, with a soul mate. If listening alone, it’ll likely set you thinking of when you last saw this person, and when you’ll see them next. Olive’s mother’s touching answer phone message seals this sense of humanity, mixed with the machines, as it closes the track Everything Is Okay.

Green-House’s A Host For All Kinds Of Life can be ordered from Leaving Records.