The Spirit of Spring Awakens By Chrissie Sheppard

 

The Spirit of Spring Awakens

By

Chrissie Sheppard

Written by

Andy Rogers

 

The run of excellent music coming from husband & wife team Steve & Chrissie Sheppard continues with this beautiful new solo release from Chrissie. “The Spirit of Spring Awakens” is a song to acknowledge the beauty of spring as it awakens each year.

It seems that while sat at the computer working Chrissie looked out at the glorious blue sky and started to think of spring and how everything starts to feel just a little bit better as the weather warms up and nature awakens from its winter sleep once again.

Chrissie’s musical first love is of course the flute and while recent releases have added keyboards courtesy of her husband Steve this latest single uses only the wonderfully atmospheric sounds of solo flute along with some carefully chosen sounds of nature.

The single opens with the sound of a bee buzzing by as birds sing their chorus to welcome spring. Chrissie’s gentle flute then appears as more birds then join the chorus and Chrissie cleverly emulates the sound of a cuckoo using her flute. There is the gentlest of breezes as the birds continue to welcome the season with their songs and more bees fly quietly by while all the while Chrissie’s flute continues to float like clouds across the musical scene. The overall effect of this exquisite blend of nature sounds and Chrissie’s plaintive yet beautiful flute work is similar to the early classic new age flute releases of Terry Oldfield or maybe something by Nigel Shaw.

Slowly the music returns to the theme we heard at the start of the single and as the piece comes to an end we hear the new spring day truly beginning with the sound of church bells in the village calling the faithful to prayer.

All in all, “The Spirit of Spring Awakens” is yet another excellent single release from Chrissie Sheppard. Her love of the flute is well known and as a musician she continues to go from strength to strength - this new single is a  fine addition to her catalogue for any lover of new age based flute music.

Oceans EP By M. Cross Dougherty

 

Oceans EP

By

M. Cross Dougherty

Written by

Steve Sheppard

 

This style of music by M. Cross Dougherty is something I adore, descriptive electronic ambient tonal delights and about one of my favourite subjects Oceans, as I live on the coast of the Mediterranean this fits me beautifully. Here we have 5 crafted short form narratives that manifest the sounds, moods, the undulation of the waves, and more of the said subject matter blissfully.

M. Cross Dougherty is known for his atmospheric, synth-driven releases and on Oceans he gifts us something quite transformative and deeply meditative too. The opening piece called Undulated is our first nautical location of timbre, the gentle undulation of tone on this piece is a veritable dreamy like oasis of vibration, and softly rising and descending synths in a classy start to the release.

Expectations soon follows, a piece that has a base ambient construct, but only diverges slightly from its inception, leaving the mists of musical time to be pulled to and fro by the listener, and one that reminds me of a the more ambient material that synth supremo Kevin Kendle might manifest.

Floods has a tentative start, one that builds and adds a layer of percussion and energy as it moves onwards, the sounds contained within leave the listener with a sense of expectation, of where the piece perhaps is intended to go, reminding me in structure and vibration, in a similar style that can sometimes be found by artists like Anantakara.

The penultimate offering is entitled Momentary, and quite bizarrely reminds me of one of our tracks, I refer exactly to an album that Chrissie Sheppard and I released in 2024 called When The Sun Has Legs. That release describes the event of a storm over the ocean near our home, and the elevated synth tone here reminds me of that day manifesting music that related to an impending oceanic disturbance over the lapis seas. The artist has manifested a clever track here, one that is beautifully descriptive, but also quite emotionally powerful as well.

The concluding narrative has a reversal within its structures that is compelling, the music twists back on its self in a slice of electronic mastery that I sometimes use to add extra layers and effects myself, there is also a sense of a tonal uplift here that ushers forth the final parting wave of the ocean, as it retreats on the piece Bits.

Oceans EP by M. Cross Dougherty is just the album I needed today to bring a little extra creativity into my mind, it is artistically thoughtful and created mindfully, and has all the elements of a truly fascinating and evolving musical narrative based solidly within the ambient and electronic music genres. Personally I loved it, and I was able to get thoroughly lost with the tone and timbre of the weave of the EP with consummate ease.