I started running ‘seriously ’- by that I mean not just a few k around the park, grumbling to myself - during a particularly difficult time in my life, and quickly came to realise how it helped to calm my busy mind - what I now recognise, self-diagnosed, as ADHD. Then I started using running apps and lost that peace. I pushed harder, chased faster times. Looking back, the calm I’d thought I’d found turned into stress.
Later this month will be eight years since my mother died suddenly - one of those moments that reroutes everything after it, whether you notice it at the time or not. What followed was many years of unresolved grief, anxiety and a lot of pain. I guess running became a way to avoid that grief, rather than face it. I treated it like a problem I could out-train, the same way the apps turned stillness into another target to hit.
That was the pattern for a while - pace, mileage, outrunning grief that had nowhere else to go. Then, without planning it, the music changed and so did the running. Thinking about it now, I don’t think that’s a coincidence - it’s all tangled up with running this label and my own relationship with the plant world too. It wasn’t just one album, but months of listening to ambient-adjacent - probably around two hundred kilometres if I’m checking my app - before I noticed I wasn’t running from the grief any more. Somewhere in there, without meaning to, I’d started running with it instead. So much so that I’d begin queuing up albums for my runs… something recommended by a friend, something I’d discovered on a Reddit thread - the ambient music thread on there is actually amazing - or whatever.
I’ve known Cynthia Bernard’s work as marine eyes for a while - back in lockdown, my friend Joe Clay of Bytes shared her album chamomile with me, and like most things he recommends, I was instantly hooked on the hazy, lysergic ambience that emanated from it.
Cynthia works out of LA, splitting her time between marine eyes solo and two other projects - one third of Almost An Island, one half of Awakened Souls Music - alongside running Cloud Collecting, a label and community built around ambient music, art and curation, centring women and gender-expansive artists on the idea that “music can heal and help us feel both lost and found.”
This month she sent me ‘hidden hour’, out on Cloud Collecting later this month - her fourth solo album, and the first full-length on her own label. The title alone felt like it already knew what I’d been doing all this time…
Cynthia’s grandmother had a stroke that took her speech but not her ability to sing - which is where her interest in music as a form of therapy began. hidden hour is eighteen songs, one hour exactly, written across a year of private moments - a bridge near an oak - the Oak of the Golden Dream, as it turns out, the same one Harold Budd once wrote about
a mountaintop in Los Padres, a tea hut in the Mendocino redwoods. Lap steel, piccolo guitar, mandolin, synth, and two collaborators - Líom and Dimming - brought in from opposite corners of Europe.
In her words, it’s “an invitation to slow down, listen closely, and create nourishing time that’s within our grasp.” In other words; the opposite of the apps.
I started therapy myself a year ago, to work through this grief properly. August was my first month without it, since my therapist - like most sensible people in Lisbon - took the month off. Without really deciding to, I found my own version of it: running to an ambient album start to finish, letting the record decide when I’d turn around instead of an app telling me how far I should go.
Somewhere around the halfway mark, I felt like something shifted. The grief was still there - I know it always will be - but it stopped feeling like something I had to wrestle with. It started feeling more like the weather; moving across me, instead of something I had to outrun.
Pauline Oliveros spent a career on the difference between hearing and listening - between sound arriving and attention actually meeting it. Running to ‘hidden hour’ was when I finally noticed what all those months of pounding those ambient miles had already been doing to my grief. It had given it room, room to breathe.
Which is a long and winding way of saying: run to this album from start to finish. You’ll work out why halfway through, and you won’t look back.
I’m still learning to let things take the time they need. The grief hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s just found room to sit with me now.
Some days that’s enough.
‘hidden hour’ is out on 23rd September.
There’s a listening party happening on Bandcamp too on 22nd September.
Photos: hidden hour recording locations by Cynthia
