“I DREAMT WE LEFT THIS PLACE”: AN INTERVIEW WITH HEATH

When Heath’s art school shut down at the start of the pandemic, they packed their bags and road-tripped to a friend’s house in Arizona. “It was kind of like an art house,” Heath tells me over Zoom. They are wearing a yellow beanie and their bedroom wall is covered in art, including a “Vote for the Planet” poster. They smile a lot when they speak and they wait for a second before responding to my questions to make sure they aren’t interrupting me (something I still need to learn how to master.)

“[My friend’s] dad’s a painter and screen-printer, his sister [makes] jewelry, and Raven [and I] are sound artists,” Heath says. Heath, their friend, and their friend’s family spent most of their days during lockdown creating art. But it was the Arizona nights that inspired Heath to begin working on their album, “I Dreamt We Left this Place.” 

“At night, we would bike at 3 am because Arizona is really hot, so it’d be really warm out,” Heath explains. “We’d be biking and listening to music to relax us. So I started making music to listen to while I was biking.”

“I Dreamt We Left this Place,” Heath’s first ambient album, consists of ten songs and has a heavy lo-fi influence. Heath added nature sounds to the album to ground the synthetic loops. They like the sounds of birds and rain, specifically. “I was focusing on things that calmed me down so that I could get through last year,” Heath says. Not only did they lose their three jobs and have to leave the San Francisco Insitute of Art campus, but they were also told a month into the pandemic that their school was closing down for good. Thankfully, this proved not to be true and Heath was still able to graduate, but the experience was still understandably stressful.

Despite each song only taking a day to make, Heath spent six months working on the album. “It was mainly sparks of inspiration,” Heath says. “Each song elicits a very specific time.” 

The song “All I Can Be is Still” was written when Heath thought their school was closing and realized there was nothing they could do. However, they think that other people will have very different takeaways from each song because ambient music is so personal. One friend sent them a two-paragraph analysis of the album, unprompted when it first came out. “She wrote things about how it reminded her of memories fading,” Heath says. “[It was] really sweet.”

In art school, Heath created many fascinating sound installations including a sound based on the bonding of molecule and protein. The protein was one that causes certain types of cancer. The molecule was a medicine that helped heal the protein. They got a crystallography graph of the two bonding and made it into music. You can check out even more of their art at juliafairbrother.com.

Their album is available on Spotify, Apple Music, and Soundcloud.

photos courtesy of Heath