Chaos Emeralds

Chaos Emeralds started out as a breezy collection of experimental beats made mainly from natural sounds, synths and vocals. There are sparsely arranged drums, with subtle percussive layers enmeshing with canopies of found sounds that bounce around excitedly, weaving around pools of melodic poetry that speak deeply in metaphor and sensory images. This album came to embody a great deal more in the end, as it travelled through three years of change and transformation. Most of the vocals on the album were poems that arose from the intensity of emotional healing, and the spurts of clarity and insight that came out of that. The themes of the poems followed on from those presented in LUPA, continuing to document the story that runs throughout all of Elsa Hewitt’s albums. The poems and the beats were two separate, organic creations that were not fused until much later. Unimaginable Pain, Citrinitas and Wash The Sea were improvisations that despite being half wordless and roughly recorded, were potent enough to remain central to the piece. Hewitt worked on the album in 2020 and 2021, before moving to the north and subsequently taking a step back in order to focus on healing, integration and recalibration. Work on the album continued in 2023, with several new tracks and elements being added, finally bringing the creation and all its concepts to a conclusion. The tracks were made predominantly from synths and spontaneous field recordings of nature, creatures, people and situations, as well as guitar, vocal processing and resampling of her own flute-playing. The last track Anahata is based around a binaural beat at the healing frequency of 963hz, giving it a very meditative quality. The initial recordings that spawned the album were made in and around a shared house in south London, where Hewitt and her housemates were fortunate enough to have a large, thriving garden. The creaking rope of a rusty swing became the first sound to be used in Avery Albino, people outside, birds in the trees, a bird that flew into the house, drumming on trees, fireworks on new year’s eve, a trip to the beach, the cat that came to live with them, amongst others, were sounds that featured on this album. Chaos Emeralds sees Hewitt further reinforce her style of making unusual time signatures feel so natural that they are barely detectable, as well as creating ambience with vocals and painterly sound-worlds that capture the deep yet abstract feelings of the moment. The album was conceived at a time when the traffic had slowed almost to a complete stop, and you could hear nature in detail, free from the never-ending chorus of pollution that normally crowds it. The air felt clearer, the sounds felt juicier, the light felt more penetrating. The quietness was very peaceful, and the local wildlife appeared to be flourishing. The songs came to embody a primitive stage of rebirth, like bright sunlight shining into cluttered spaces where dusty objects of the past were in a state of disintegration. They followed on from the deep, dark winter of LUPA, rising like the spring, fragile but resolute, absorbing, expressing and responding to the world like a baby, experiencing the world with heightened senses.