Hi Everybody

There will be a Bandcamp listening party for the next release on Clay Pipe Magic Lantern by Garden Gate tomorrow Thursday 15th Feb at 8.00pm GMT you can RSPV HERE It was great fun last time we did this, so I hope to see a few of you there. During the party I'll be opening up pre-orders via Greedbag, it will go back on pre-order the following morning and released on 29th March.

Frances

Clay Pipe is pleased to introduce Garden Gate, the musical project of North Country, New York-based artist Timmi Meskers.

After her time with Brown Recluse, a bittersweet psych-pop sextet, and White Candles, a Radiophonic Workshop-inspired electronic duo, Meskers merged the qualities of both groups into a new project and the first Garden Gate single, Houses, appeared in 2016 on Good Behavior Records. Following this, came a clutch of acclaimed releases on labels such as Sunstone and Library of the Occult, notably The Dark Harvest LP (which received a 5-star review in Shindig) and the sought-after 2021 LP, Blood Mansion, an original score for a conceptual horror film.

Magic Lantern is a collection of melancholy yet hopeful neoclassical library pieces with analogue electronic elements that originally soundtracked Audible Originals’ Strange Company audiobook. 

Here, Timmi explains how the project came about:

“The first glimmer of Magic Lantern flickered over the kitchen sink, if memory serves. I was cleaning up with a dear friend, author Roan Parrish, and we were discussing how we could collaborate creatively. Our first idea was that she would share prose to inspire my themes, and inversely, I would share a few original themes to inspire her writing. Before we knew it, what started as a handful of stories and songs, damp with soap suds, ended up becoming a fully scored audiobook anthology for Audible Originals called Strange Company.

As a long-time fan of soundtracks and library music, I was thrilled by the opportunity to see just how much emotion I could compress into the brief connecting links that would augment a furtive kiss, a painful psychic vision, or a breeze across the bones of a scorched landscape.

Midway through the recording process, my long-term relationship broke down, and Roan let me set up a field studio in her home. I found myself grasping at any beauty I could find in the hope that it would spill into the music. Several themes from an unrealised Garden Gate album about the life of Dion Fortune also found their way in (notably, the title track), and the score became a bit more personal than initially charted. In the doomed outsiders of Roan’s gorgeously creeping prose, it was hard not to see aspects of my own life, and I found catharsis and healing in the creation of the music that soundtracked her characters' lives.” 

Timmi Meskers 2024