Her new record, Lost – For Annie, comes out Friday via DC label Outside Time.

Here’s a perfect introduction to the work of Ireland-based musician Natalia Beylis, conveyed by a Bandcamp commenter who bought her 2021 release Variations on a Sewing Machine.

It’s one of those nights of browsing Bandcamp where you think, “There’s nothing cool left here,” and then you think, “What is Natalia Beylis up to right now?”

Variations on a Sewing Machine is exactly what the title says: Using a Singer MCPK 5802C sewing machine and a looper pedal, Beylis creates singular, intense sonic patterns. (She says in release notes that “the machine caught fire during the recording process.”)

For her release Real Live Birds, Vol. 1, Beylis mixed field-recorded and sample birdcalls, ran them through effect pedals and cut-and-percussed them. The second in her series called The Sunken Hum is titled “On the Edge of the Bog: A Day in Three Acts.” She explains the project in release notes: “On these tracks, I’ve patched together common sounds from my life in Leitrim (a sparsely populated county in the Northwest of Ireland) in the hopes of creating a tapestry of my day.”

Although some of her work can be inscrutable, Beylis conveys the opposite on her remarkably beautiful ambient recordings, which are lush, velveteen and wholly comforting. Whose Woods These Are, a collaboration with Cork, Ireland composer-cellist Eimear Reidy, features four extended pieces for cello and various keyboard instruments; Beylis’ touch on upright piano, electric piano, and organ is as precise as her field recordings are loose.

An environmental activist whose work is awash in urgent calls for action, Beylis’ love of the natural world informs nearly everything she touches (except, perhaps, her smoldering Singer). Whose Woods These Are is centered on this theme, according to release notes: “Imagine a public domain of trees where no one owned them & together we were their guardians. It is our hope that by bringing an audience to the trees, we will encourage people to relish time spent in nature and look after the woodlands.”

On Friday, the Washington, DC label Outside Time is releasing Beylis’ new album, Lost – For Annie. Featuring ambient pieces that rely on field recordings captured where she lives and works, as well an interview with local farmers and citizen archeologists involved in preserving Irish sweathouses — 18th and 19th century sauna-like structures with domed ceilings.

Here’s what Beylis says in the liner notes about the title piece, which features extended sounds of her feet clomping along a pathway:

Nearly all of the sounds for this piece were recorded in Drumnadubber, County Leitrim. The birdsong at the start and at the end was captured in a section of commercial forestry that has since been clearfelled. Another part of the piece, empty of birdsong, was recorded several years later in the new wild fledgling forest that has now grown in the wake of the clearfell.

She continues:

Aside from the blackbird, all of the species of birds whose names are identified in this piece are currently on the ‘Red List of Birds of High Conservation Concern in Ireland’. When the birds on this list are gone, it will only be through these types of recordings that we will remember their voices. For now, we eagerly await the imminent return of the birds to the young woodland at Drumnadubber.’

Lost – For Annie is the second release for Outside Time, which is owned and operated by writer, curator and Smithsonian-Folkways operative Jonathan Williger.

Below, Natalia generously offered an overview of five albums that are currently resonating with her.

Lori Goldston – On A Moonlit Hill In Slovenia

This album was recorded onto a handheld zoom during a live gig in Slovenia. I initially heard this when it came out on Eiderdown Records in the same batch as my own album, on the label ‘The Steadfast Starry Universe’. I love the way Lori is in no rush to get anywhere on this album. Her cello sways along to the atmosphere of the crickets and the soft murmur of the audience. Her music is just another creature melding their voice into the nightscape. I get inspired by the confidence with which Lori leaves space in her playing on this album. You just know that she’s taking the time to listen to what the crickets have to say. When I put this on it makes me feel like I’m right there with her on that moonlit hill. Lori’s cassette tape hasn’t left my ‘Now Playing’ box in the three and a half years since I’ve had it.

Alice Coltrane – Ptah, the el Daoud

This was the first Alice Coltrane album that I heard, and I could not get my head around the playing or the structure. It disrupted my views on what was allowed within music and initially because of this caused me to feel emotions akin to discomfort. At the time, I listened to a lot of punk and hardcore so I was used to sounds that other people considered unmusical. But this was a level of abstraction beyond anything I had previously experienced. I didn’t know you were allowed to play piano like that. I didn’t know that music could be so free and loose. I didn’t know that women were allowed to be band leaders. I didn’t know that piano playing could enter realms that were this singular and unconventional.

Back then, if Alice Coltrane was ever mentioned there was always a guy in the room who would say that she was only known because she was John Coltrane’s wife and how she wasn’t any good anyway. That always made me want to listen to her even more closely. In the liner notes, Alice writes, ‘Sometimes on Earth we don’t have to wait for death to go through a sort of purging, a purification. That march you hear is a march on to purgatory rather than a series of changes a person might go through.’ Her words fully sum up the effect that this album first had on me.

Nass El Ghiwane – Narjak Ana La M’Chite

I picked this up on cassette tape about ten years ago. I didn’t know the band or the album at the time. My partner and I had come home with a stack of music after visiting tape kiosks and electronics goods shops in Morocco and asking the people who were working there for recommendations of what to buy. Nearly everyone spoke enthusiastically of Nass El Ghiwane as one of their all-time favourite groups from the country. The members of Nass El Ghiwane first began working together in the late 1960s as part of an avant-garde political theatre group and formed the band in 1970/1971. They are widely regarded as revolutionising folk music at the time by bringing together influences from various Moroccan music heritages, incorporating western instruments into their playing and highlighting social and political injustices in their lyrics.

Since I’ve owned it, this is the tape I listen to nearly every time I’m taking a shower. The music brings me immense joy and lifts my mood no matter what. When I’m playing with other musicians, I strive to reach this same place of joy within the music.  My partner bought me the album on LP a few years ago (in case the tape should ever warble into dissolution). The LP version plays at just a slightly faster speed than the cassette. I don’t know which speed is the correct speed but I prefer the slower tape version.

Dead Moon – In The Graveyard

I used to live in New Orleans in 2001/2002, and one day my friend Mitchell Powers rode his bike all around town to announce to everyone that Dead Moon (a band most of us had never heard of at the time) was playing a show that night and that they were unmissable. Mitchell had a wide, varied taste in music so we all went along on his recommendation. Not only was the gig unmissable, but for me it was life-changing. I became a devoted lifelong Dead Moon fan from the moment that the trio gathered together for a ceremonial moment onstage just before the music started. Drummer Andrew Loomis lit a long tapered candle that was placed into an empty Jack Daniels bottle and perched at the end of his drum kit. In that moment the trio melted into a singular unit. Their live set lasted until the candle burnt out, and in that time I danced ’til I was soaked in the sweaty mass of the bundle of friends and strangers who all became one under the Dead Moon Night.

There’s just something about Dead Moon. I’ve travelled across time zones to see them play live. I’ve watched their documentary ‘Unknown Passage’ a dozen times. I’m not much of a collector of memorabilia except when it comes to them – I have three Dead Moon t-shirts, a couple of signed tour posters and a few patches. I once did a three-and-a-half-hour podcast about them. They lived the ethos of DIY punk: driving their own van on tour, selling their own merch, fixing their own instruments, making do with the things that were around them and unapologetically living their lives in a way that allowed them to have total control over their own creativity. Plus, there was Toody Cole. Toody played bass and sang and stalked around the stage. I think she must have been in her early 50s when I first saw Dead Moon.  I’d never seen a woman anywhere near that age performing in a band before and it blew open my perception of what women were allowed to do and allowed to be.

Robert Turman – Flux

Flux was originally released in 1981, but I only heard this album for the first time a few years ago. This is perfect for when I’m alone and stretched out on the couch and needing to let my brain drift down a river of nothingness. I’m in awe of the pacing and restraint of this composition. It is so masterful in the way it gives each individual delicate bewitching sound enough time to have its moment to shine. I’m deeply inspired by what Robert has achieved with this release. I had seen Robert’s name around for years (mostly mentioned by Aaron Dilloway through Hanson Records news) but this album actually came up as a YouTube suggestion and it was the cover that caught my attention. I was delighted to find that there were copies of ths LP reissue still available and I got fairly giddy at being able to get a copy off of Robert himself.  

To buy Lost – For Annie, hit up Outside Time’s Bandcamp.