As with his newest album Saru l-Qamar (Phantom Limb, 2024), this piece was formed from archival recordings of Maltese emigrées sending taped messages back home, dating back to the 70’s and 80’s. In the era between email and video camcorders, in a period of significant political upheaval in Malta, audio messages were an easy way for friends and family to keep their loved ones updated with news. In territories as far-flung as Australia, Canada, the US and the UK, Maltese immigrants would often use the traditional songform of għana to record recent events and post tapes back home. It’s quite profound how many of these messages focus on the desire to return to Malta and the lament at having to leave.
With the very generous help of Malta’s nonprofit archival foundation Magna Żmien and the support of the Kunsill Malti għall-Arti, Vella was allowed access to an extensive database of these recordings and permission to create new music from them. Mostly using analogue synthesis for the arrangements, delving into the otherworldly, outer-body experience of communing with a long-passed countrymen whose story in many ways reflects his own. Vella is a second generation Maltese, not quite old enough to remember cassettes but able to recall videotapes mailed to Malta. He employed some low-level audio cleaning to help bring out the voices, and some gentle pitch-shifting to aid the arrangement process, and responded to these heartening, revealing, deeply moving recordings with his own songwriting.
A Lily is the solo project of Brighton musician, writer and record label director James Vella (yndi halda, Phantom Limb). A Lily’s catalogue covers a breadth of music, spanning electronic music, gentle Americana, wistful alt-pop, ambient and drone and considerably more. Recent releases have focused on exploratory experimental ambient music founded in analogue synthesis. A Lily vehicle acts as a home for Vella’s compositions outside the better known yndi halda project, for which he is also a key songwriter.