Martha and the Muffins‘ Mark Gane’s ‘Backyard Music’ Is a Meditative Journey Via Sound, Soil, and Sonic Reminiscence
Mark Gane—co-founder of iconic Canadian band Martha and the Muffins and the thoughts behind worldwide hit “Echo Seaside”—has launched his first solo album, Backyard Music, a group of experimental instrumental compositions impressed by plant names and imagined inside worlds. Launched Could 1, 2025, Backyard Music is a sprawling, deeply intuitive mission that took form over many years and now arrives as an ambient, clever meditation on reminiscence, nature, and sound.
The Toronto-based composer, visible artist, and sonic experimenter first started dreaming of Backyard Music years in the past, spurred by a suggestion from his accomplice and artistic collaborator Martha Johnson. “She stated I ought to do a solo mission that mixed my three nice loves—music, portray, and gardening,” Gane explains. “Ultimately, I began asking: If vegetation had been individuals, what would their lives sound like?” That seed grew right into a wealthy, textured album composed from over 50 years of collected studio, area, and located recordings.
Every of the 11 instrumental items is known as after a standard plant—Bee Balm, Feverfew, Creeping Charlie, and the haunting Love Lies Bleeding, which incorporates the lone sung lyric: “Honey Bee you’re gone for good, and so I sing this track…”. From miniature sonic sculptures to lush ambient collages, Gane’s compositions defy style and reward shut listening. Reviewers have referred to as the album “a movie that passes earlier than the eyes of our ears” and “a whimsical wander by means of the panorama of the writer’s creativeness”.
Although extremely conceptual, Backyard Music isn’t chilly or calculated. “My method was nearly fully intuitive,” says Gane. “I wasn’t attempting to pressure something. I simply let every bit evolve from sounds I’d archived—reside recordings, area sounds, tape hiss, voice fragments. The presence of the human voice confirmed up unexpectedly and stayed.” That presence takes many varieties: a chopped-up interview with Delia Derbyshire, a 1951 Valentine from Gane’s mom, a ghostly late-night cellphone name in Lethal Nightshade.
Initially put aside whereas Martha and the Muffins tasks took priority and each artists handled well being challenges, Backyard Music was resurrected in 2022 throughout COVID lockdowns.
“Ending it felt like gardening,” Gane says. “Meditative, grounded, exterior of time.”
Even after mixing was wrapped, the album sat quietly for 2 years, delayed not by doubt, however by a reluctance to re-enter the promotional machine. “When confronted with the selection of constructing an internet site or working within the backyard, the backyard at all times received,” he laughs.
Gane recommends listening at nighttime, mendacity down, permitting the music to clean over like nightfall wind by means of lavender. Blended with Ray Dillard and mastered by Graemme Brown at Zen Mastering, Backyard Music is a testomony to Gane’s lifelong observe throughout disciplines. His historical past spans avant-garde efficiency, collaborations with sonic pioneers like Laurie Anderson and John Oswald, and design work starting from album artwork to city gardens.
Although greatest identified for pop brilliance with Martha and the Muffins—together with co-producing albums with Daniel Lanois and David Lord—Backyard Music reveals a unique Gane: a solitary gardener of sound, sowing strangeness and wonder in equal measure.
“It was most fascinating to don’t know what was creating the sounds I used to be listening to,” wrote Kevin Staples of Tough Commerce. “So otherworldly… fairly actually fantastic”.
Backyard Music is out there now on all main streaming platforms. For listeners of Brian Eno, Pauline Oliveros, or Boards of Canada—and for anybody who finds solace within the hum of life’s quiet corners—Mark Gane’s long-awaited solo debut provides a richly immersive world to vanish into.
Hello Mark! Good to satisfy you! Care to introduce your self to the readers for these not acquainted with your music?
Hey everybody, I’m Mark Gane, a founding member of the choice artwork band Martha and the Muffins, which began in 1977 within the early days of Toronto’s punk/new wave scene, centred round Queen St. W. and environs. MatM’s best-known track is ‘Echo Seaside’, which I wrote and which grew to become a worldwide hit in 1980. For a lot of many years, I’ve been lively as a songwriter, producer, visible artist, sonic explorer/improviser, and gardener, not essentially in that order! After 9 Martha and the Muffins albums, I’ve simply launched my first solo album, ‘Backyard Music’, a group of instrumental items primarily based on widespread plant names.
You’ve spent many years creating Backyard Music. How did your relationship with these sounds evolve over time, and what made now the fitting second to launch them?
I’ve been accumulating sounds in a critical method ever since I borrowed the Uher transportable tape recorder from the Ontario Faculty of Artwork Sound Lab within the early 70s. As a scholar at OCA (now OCAD), I labored as a monitor within the Sound Lab, which gave me entry to its tools. The Uher enabled recording and playback at 4 completely different speeds, instantly remodeling regular, on a regular basis sounds into all kinds of unrecognizable worlds. A lot of the fabric that went into ‘Backyard Music’ had been round for a very long time, ready for the fitting second to return into usefulness. Other than area recordings, and many others, very early on I made it a behavior to report something that occurred to be arrange at any given time – possibly only a bizarre acoustic sound, tape loop, or synth patch – one thing that may or won’t be useable sooner or later. When it got here to composing the music for this mission, there was already an enormous quantity of fabric to delve into. Revisiting some recordings felt just like the completion of a circle in time – directly each outdated and new.
Early on in the course of the second yr of Covid, I spotted that if I didn’t full this mission now, it could by no means get carried out, so I took benefit of getting to be comparatively remoted, buckled down, and completed it. Inexplicably, I then sat on it for 2 extra years – I don’t actually know why – I used to be very assured and proud of the outcomes, however in any case, right here we’re!
You describe this mission as intuitive and meditative. How do you know when a chunk was “carried out” or prepared to face by itself?
It’s a mixture of instinct and expertise. I’ve been doing this sort of factor for about 50 years now, so I prefer to suppose I’ve an affordable sense of when to go away it alone. It’s related in some ways to performing reside improvised music. A lot of it’s simply deep listening, figuring out when to remain out of it, when so as to add one thing significant, and when to exit.
Subject recordings, tape hiss, even a 1951 Valentine out of your mom—how do reminiscence and imperfection form the emotional arc of Backyard Music?
At first, having compiled the record of widespread plant names, it appeared prefer it is likely to be a reasonably easy inventive endeavour – marrying a title to a suitably evocative aural panorama.
However because the items developed, I spotted all of them with the exception I consider ‘Child’s Breath’, had human or humanlike voices, a few of which, like my mom’s Valentine to my father, had been very emotionally resonant to me, coming by means of 74 yr outdated airwaves earlier than I used to be born. And so the thought developed that these widespread plant names had been changing into “personifications”, generally unusual, natural, and imperfect. A backyard is many issues – lively and decay, laden with reminiscence: these of the earth and vegetation themselves, and of the various creatures that transfer by means of it.
I spent a very long time deciding on the order of the items, for it’s certainly an album, a visit you’re meant to absorb one steady listening, with the lights low. All very old-fashioned, so I attempted to be aware in taking the listener by means of all these very disparate worlds with an outlined starting, center, and finish. The moments of silence between the tracks on the CD are longer than normal, to provide the listener time to transition.
How do your practices as a visible artist and gardener affect your musical instincts, particularly when working in summary or ambient varieties?
Because the saying goes, “One artwork, all arts.” After I’m portray, gardening, or approaching music making in a sure method, I’ve the identical feeling, and I’m in the identical zone no matter which exercise I’m doing. All of it comes from the identical elementary, common essence, so every observe influences, evokes, and cross-fertilizes the others.