Angel Tears in Sunlight

Offers the kind of transcendental electronics that burrow into your brain. [Mar 2021, p.37]

As well as being aware of frequencies in our immediate surroundings, deep listening observes cosmological energies. Angel Tears In Sunlight seems to resonate with Oliveros' observations by interweaving distant galaxies with her own rapturously intimate sonic sphere. One of Oliveros' greatest assertions is that is not only the ear that listens – you listen with your whole body.

In an interview once, she admitted, “I see things in my head. I dream in colour”. This posthumous addition to her near perfect catalogue confirms that statement, expertly revealing how attuned to the universe she was and how vibrantly her imagination shone in the dark.

Retains an elegant spirituality. [Mar 2021, p.89]

Her soundscapes are transportive and evocative, but they also contain detail and texture that plays with a sense of natural versus unnatural soundscapes, the real versus the imagined. Left in the between space, this is fascinating stuff.

It is as gloriously varied as her 1980s output. Some tracks see her taking Steve Reich-style minimalist marimba riffs but escorting them through endless harmonic mutations.

Angel Tears in Sunlight, her final album, continues in the same expansive, unconstrained mode as her earlier work but explores different tonal realms.

Rather than sounding like an epitaph, though, Angel Tears arrives as a beacon of hope and change. The lightest and most playful of Strom’s recorded work, it signals new vistas ahead, ones that sadly will now have to be explored by others.