World’s Most Stressed Out Gardener, the brand new full-length record from Chad VanGaalen, gleams with the Calgary songwriter’s musical signatures: found sound, reverb, polychromatic folk music that is by turns cartoonish and hyperphysical – like ultra magnified footage of a virus or a leaf.
Watch on YouTube.
Out now on Flemish Eye/Sub Pop, the LP began life as a “pretty minimal” flute record. (There’s only a vestige now, on “Flute Peace, “one of three instrumentals.) Later it became an electronic record “for a while” and finally, “right at the last second,” it “turned into a pile of garbage.” The good kind of garbage: glinting, useful, free. Music as compost – leaves, and branches ready to be re-ingested by the earth, turned into a flower.
Latest single/accompanying music video, “Starlight,” is a krautrock pipe-dream. Stream on Soundcloud watch on YouTube.