Haiku Salut announce new album The Hill, The Light, The Ghost, due in August

Tascam field recorder was big influence on Derbyshire three piece’s latest

Haiku Salut have announced their new album, ‘The Hill, The Light, The Ghost’, on Secret Name Records, following hot on the heels of the recent and utterly sublime Juno Daily – In The Mix session the band completed for us.

After member Sophie Barkerwood was given a Tascam field recorder as a gift, the Derbyshire electronica trio eventually reworked the recordings into their new project: an auditory study on hauntings, ghosts and memory.

‘The Hill, The Light, The Ghost has a similarly grandiose vision to their third album, ‘There Is No Elsewhere’, and continues in the darker mood of their fourth, their original soundtrack to Buster Keaton’s ‘The General’.

Speaking on the recording process, Barkerwood said: “I carried (the Tascam) around with me in case anything interesting happened. I guess I wanted to capture little pieces of the world in the same way we all take photographs. It wasn’t immediately apparent that we would begin to use these sounds as the architecture for an album, but as our writing process evolved the textures of these memories became a bank of inspiration.” 

“We then began actively searching for ghosts in the world and framing the songs around their qualities,” Sophie continues. “Gathering recordings, removing them from their context and building worlds around them. Capturing and preserving personal experiences, and evoking vivid spaces. You could say the record is a miniature exploration of sound in relation to memory. Each piece is intimately connected to a place in time.” 

The Hill, The Light, The Ghost forms a suite of nine songs that combine to tell an overarching story of experience, memory, precious moments and echoes of past lives. 

One of the songs, ‘Entering’, was inspired by a visit to an abandoned house in Germany in 2019. “I had heard there was a library and a grand piano in there that I wanted to sample,“ says Sophie. ”I didn’t care that it would be out of tune, it was the piano’s ghost we wanted. Other people’s memories. The house was huge. Even though people visit it a lot most of the residents belongings were still there: clothes, kitchen utensils, dead people’s handwriting.” 

In the basement, they were met with an even more unnerving find: an abandoned urology clinic. “We went in with the intention of sampling the piano and found an operating table with stirrups and operating implements still in place.”

The Hill, The Light, The Ghost will be released on Secret Name Records on August 27.