The first, but hopefully not the last, of an occasional series of guest posts comes from our good friend Joe Clay, who co-founded Bytes with me. Launched in April 2019, Bytes is an outlet for abstract electronics, music aimed at home listening and moments of pensive thought, with releases from the likes of Minotaur Shock, GLOK, Franz Kirmann, Herrmann Kristoffersen and jik. Joe and I first met in the mid-90s, working behind the counter of the once-mighty, now-defunct Our Price in Bath, and we’ve been swapping records ever since. As I’ve admitted before, Seeds owes him more than a few recommendations: we lifted the name wholesale from Music For Plants, the ambient column Joe wrote for Ransom Note with his wife Ali.
So it only seemed fair to hand him the keys - temporarily, you understand! - and here he goes digging into the electronic Christian ambient of Sally Daley, a Chicago church musician who made tapes for herself and God.
I am not a religious person (spiritual, at a push), but if I walked into a church and heard the warm drones of Sally Daley’s organ coming from the pipes I might just be converted. At the very least I would sit down and listen. For many years Daley (who died in 2020) worked as musical director at the Immaculate Heart of Mary Church in Chicago, while also releasing a series of cassettes in the late-1980s and early-1990s on her own Tau-Spirit Music Productions label. Her recordings range from early music and classical to avant-garde and ambient, but some of her music has been classified as part of a micro-milieu called “electronic Christian ambient music” or (as one wag on YouTube puts it) Oneohtrix Point Heaven.
Not many of the 15 or so cassettes Daley released are available to listen to now. The excellent Ultravillage website has published a selected discography online, which includes My God and My All, a cassette released in 1990 that is the high point of her output. Daley’s billowing, otherworldly synthesiser excursions sound uncannily like something James Ferraro would have released in the late-Noughties (think Discovery/Clear)
or REREX 1 and 2
This has something to do with the tape hiss that permeates the recordings, but as with Ferraro’s oeuvre from that period, the feeling Daley’s music evokes is one of complete submersion in her strange, aquatic drones - there is even the odd keyboard effect that sounds like a dolphin call. The titular piece is subtitled ‘A Seaside Meditation’, so this is not an accident.
Others have compared this release to Boards of Canada, Laaraji and the music from Zelda. It’s also amazing to think that it emerged at the same time the KLF and the Orb were introducing New Age flavours to their brand of ambient-dance. However, it seems unlikely that Daley was aware of anything happening outside her liturgical world. She was making these Sacred Ambient Works only for herself and God.
My God and My All was released digitally on Bandcamp in May by Midair Museum
…an ambient and New Age reissue label based in New York. The hope is that they have been granted access to Daley’s full catalogue and will start making some more of it available. Moonscape, originally released in 1993, is of particular interest: according to Ultravillage it is “tonal, spectral synth music with little discernible structure, careening from one bizarre melody to the next”. Autechrist? Can’t wait!