cloud collecting #27: Early Fern
art as representing memories + how nature makes magic possible
I hope you enjoy my conversation with multi-disciplinary artist Early Fern. I first discovered her work through Place Of Rest, released via the excellent UK label Métron Records in 2021, and was quickly drawn into her visual world through her stunning album art and beyond.
Early Fern is a transfeminine composer who makes exploratory pastoral music about memory, place, ansd being-in-the-world with synthesizers, samplers, software, and occasional traditional instruments. She has released music on Métron records and Aural Canyon. Her work has been featured in Electronic Sound Magazine, Bandcamp Daily, and Foxy Digitalis. Her visual art has been featured on her own albums, and occasionally on the work of friends, and very occasionally exhibited in gallery spaces.
1. When did you first start identifying as a creative? And how has your relationship with both your music and visual art evolved over the past few years?
This is an interesting question! I don’t know if I ever started identifying as ‘a creative,’ per se, but I bought a Korg volca keys in 2018 and I started recording music shortly after. I had grown up playing bass and had spent time in a few bands with friends, but had never really done much formal work composing or recording music before I played with the volca. Visual art was really different for me! I started doing my gel pen drawings during a period in which I lived with a few people who were visual artists, and I would often hang out and watch them work. Eventually, I wanted to feel included in their - sort of parallel play art sessions and I started drawing from photos I had taken. Pens were sort of an accident, but I was travelling and didn’t have much space for art supplies so they were an easy entry for me.
My relationship with music has changed drastically over the years! I think releasing music has been both helpful for my practice and detrimental for my relationship with music. I feel a sense of pressure now to meet expectations, and to produce work which meaningfully adds to the larger ‘ambient’ or ‘experimental electronic’ landscape. When I started and when I recorded the music on Music for Baths, I was largely just playing around and I decided to send it out because I thought the stuff I was making sounded as good as some of the stuff I was listening to. I am in a place right now of trying to reconsider how I relate to music, and specifically to releasing it (because this is where I find most of the psychological difficulty in engaging with it), but I haven’t come to any answers yet. I still like the stuff I’m making, and I still like to explore and learn all the time. Which, speaking of, I have a forthcoming album of pastoral ambient on Sound as Language later this year which I hope will please those already familiar with my work and another, very different, much more experimental project I’m considering self-release for after that comes out.
Visual art has developed more slowly and more naturally; I think I’ve gradually gained skills and competencies at composing an image and representing what I see, and obviously at some point I moved from gel-pen to gouache (which I doubt will be a permanent move, but has held up for now). I have some work I haven’t shared anywhere yet; I’ve sold most of my favorites and I’m working toward rebuilding a portfolio of work I could consider sharing in galleries.
2. I love how much of your work feels like a love letter to nature. Could you share how nature, and your time working on farms, influences both your music and art?
I appreciate that! I have always felt connected to my environment (and I mean that broadly, not just in terms of ‘natural’ spaces but in terms of my surroundings wherever I am). I do think spaces outside, where things grow more or less untended, tend to provide me with this feeling of - I am ~*somewhere else*~ where I am further from the concerns of my daily life, away from stress, in a place where ‘magic’ is possible. Those aren’t the only kinds of spaces that induce that feeling in me, but I am very often inspired to produce art when I encounter that feeling and my creative processes have really leaned into attempting to express that sense.
I worked on farms from late 2018 until mid 2023. It’s kind of difficult to pinpoint how specifically that interacted with my creative practices. It certainly kept me in rural places, which kept me working and spending a lot of my free time in relatively pastoral environments (though these were more frequently the industrialized landscapes of farming communities rather than the sort of idealized natural spaces that I really attach feelings of wonder to). The farming work schedule is very intensive, and the pay is extremely low (most US states don’t have a farmworker minimum wage, so I was often working for board and a few hundred dollars a month). I think being extremely broke and working a lot created a real need for me to supply my own entertainment during my free time, and I think in some ways that fostered my creative practices. In other ways, it prevented me from meaningfully working on music outside of the off season. Farming also kept me in a position of deep precarity (which included an eviction when I brought up illegal labor practices at a small vegetable farm I spent a season at), and I think processing that stress and loss and deprivation through art was very important to me during that time. Art remains a way that I process my feelings and I think it will probably retain that function in my life as long as I’m capable of making things.
3. How do you cloud collect (connect to childlike wonder) in your creativity?
Music and visual art are two categories of things that I feel constantly amazed by. Engaging with the work of others frequently inspires a feeling of childlike wonder in me, and I strive to create work that can really bring that feeling to others. I am often representing places or memories in which I experienced that feeling when I make a painting or compose a piece of music. Experiencing wonder and experiencing a sense of overwhelming appreciation for the place I’m in or the feelings I’m feeling are the things that drive me to produce work, I think that’s totally central to the creative process for me.
The best online place to find Early is through her Instagram, her Bandcamp and wherever you stream music.
Some marine eyes news:
The pre-order my new EP quiet circle is now live! It will be out in full next Friday, April 25th and there is a listening party on Bandcamp that same day. Would love to see you there! Excited to share these songs with you.