She captured the bees of the Genus Bombus, Who hummed in a manner both blissful and raucous, The inflorescence shimmered, the pollinators came, The millefolium meadow burst quietly into flame, (Not actual flame – that would not serve our cause) But a hypnotic, transatlantic, non-linear pause.

And now she has pressed it on tape, with a packet of yarrow for those who escape, to the pastoral silence of seed-sowing days, where the abiotic light falls in luminous haze, and the Genus Bombus and Dr CaraDonna both agree it’s the loveliest thing since manuka.

Tia and Wil’s Music To Watch Seeds Grow By series – the ambient/new-age/planty cassette label has in nine editions, tried to make a compelling case that the best way to understand ambient is to get your hands in some soil and think about it properly. Each artist chooses a plant that inspires their music and can be sown in the month of the release. Simple. Seasonal. You may have noticed it already.

For the ninth edition – the third of Season Two – they’ve brought in Portland, Oregon-based musician and field recordist Patricia Wolf, whose album Yarrow takes its name from Achillea millefolium, a flowering plant whose broad geographic range spans North America and Eurasia, which also happens to make it the perfect conceptual thread to connect Portland (where the music was written and recorded) to London (where the cassette was pressed and will land through your letterbox alongside a packet of yarrow seeds and a fact card about the plant). A transatlantic weed of the most beautiful kind.

Wolf is one of the most interesting people quietly operating at the edges of sound art. Her recent arc has taken her from grief (I’ll Look For You In Others, 2022) to a kind of luminous rebirth (See-Through, 2022), then to birds – literal birds, in Iceland, for a documentary score (Hrafnamynd, 2025) – and now, with this album, to plants. Specifically, to the invisible forces that determine whether plants live or die at all.

Yarrow was created in response to Wolf’s artist residency at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Gothic, Colorado, as part of the Art-Science Exchange Project in the summer of 2024. She worked closely with ecologists Dr Paul CaraDonna, Dr Amy Iler, Dr Jane Ogilvie, Dr Nickolas Waser, Dr Mary Price, and Dr Will Petry, spending weeks embedded in long-term research on plants, pollinators, and their interactions as the climate changes. This is not, in other words, an ambient album about plants in the vague, pastoral sense. It’s an album about plants in the way a botanist might describe them: as dynamic organisms in constant, often invisible negotiation with their environment.

Which brings us to ‘Abiotic Factors’, the album’s opening track and the subject of today’s premiere. Abiotic factors – for those of us who skipped that particular biology lesson – are the non-living environmental conditions that determine whether an organism can exist at all: light availability, temperature, rainfall, wind, soil composition. They are the infrastructure beneath the visible world, the silent set of forces that a plant cannot choose but must simply work with, adapt to, or perish. As a concept for an opening track, it’s contemplative and a perfect orientation into the album… which you’ll all hear in its entirety soon little seedlings.

The video, which we’re premiering today, was shot closer to home – Wolf’s Portland neighbourhood, through the lens of Edward Pack Davee, the filmmaker behind the Hrafnamynd documentary Wolf scored last year (check the amazing Early Memories video). As Wolf explains:

Repurposed footage for a repurposed plant. Seems fitting. The domestic ordinariness of the visuals – a neighbourhood, a street, familiar light – sits in interesting tension with music conceived in a high-altitude laboratory surrounded by ecologists measuring how the climate is quietly rearranging everything.

Wolf uses electronics, voice, and field recordings to produce non-linear compositions that draw listeners into a hypnotic inner world, and her use of melody and repetition manipulates the listener’s perception of time, conjuring vivid textures and atmospheres.

Yarrow is out June 4th on cassette and digital – the cassette comes with a packet of yarrow seeds to sow while you listen. And if you’re in London, Wolf is performing at The Old Church in Stoke Newington on June 6th. A nature musician in a converted Victorian church. The abiotic conditions are favourable.

Pre-order the cassette and digital via Bandcamp here.

“One thing I’ve learned in the woods is that there is no such thing as random. Everything is steeped in meaning, colored by relationships, one thing with another.” – Robin Wall Kimmerer

“Dedicated to intertwining the serene beauty of music with the nurturing process of planting seeds when the first new signs of life emerge in the growing season. A carefully crafted collection of ambient & minimalist soundscapes, occasionally branching into new-age. A soundtrack for quiet moments of sowing, nurturing, & witnessing the slow, rewarding process of growth. “

Tia & Wil 🌱