About this item

In 2023, Realf Heygate - who makes music as Flaer - released his debut mini-album 'Preludes', composed on his mother’s piano and his childhood cello. Returning to ODDA for his debut full-length album, Heygate is now looking in another direction. A record that embraces transition and movement, 'Translations' is in many ways more internal, less rooted to a single place and reflective of the process of laying new foundations in Cornwall.

Like 'Preludes', 'Translations' is coloured with found sounds and field recordings, from the starlings which can be heard singing through the open window of his studio, to the brittle recordings of his mother, who was a linguist, learning Spanish on a set of language tapes. In both cases, Heygate embraced the translations and memories inherent to the sounds.

“When I digitised my mother’s tapes, they warped and stuttered in a very similar way to the starling’s song,” he explains. “They had this uncanny rhythm and pulse that I couldn’t quite decode, but was saying something." These decayed transmissions hint at loss, resisting clarity in favour of the ineffable.

'Translations' is also a record of ambiguities and in-betweens, suggested by the double meaning of the album’s opening track ‘Entre’. At once intricate and expansive, threaded with birdsong and acoustic guitar motifs, this and ‘Starling Descends’ (a reference to Vaughan Williams’ ‘The Lark Ascending’) act as a bridge away from the pastoral themes of Preludes towards a more assertive sound. At times intimate in its textured instrumentation and at others more overtly grand in orchestration, reflecting a wider palette of influences.

Recorded between 2023 and 2025 – what Heygate calls “A gradual process of sowing and harvesting ideas rather than a single intense creative period” - each track follows a rhythm similar to the small maquettes and sculptures he has been working on in his visual practice, whereby structures and melodies form intuitively in moments that are as rare as they are fleeting.

TRACK LISTING

1. Entre
2. Starling Descends
3. Souvenir
4. Our Hands
5. Air Loom
6. Anagram
7. America
8. Translation
9. Land Ends
10. You And I Are Earth
11. Farewell Sweet Pea