[Welcome to Tobira Listening Diary, our new English-language essay + music-roundup series. As you know, music appreciation does not exist in a vacuum. For most of us it’s woven into the physical and emotional fabric of our lives: our hobbies, habits, and communities, our favourite films, books, art, and television. This series will explore the Tobira Records catalogue through a different lens each edition, moving beyond the classic ‘new release’ beat to try to find new meanings and connections in our musical landscape. Written, compiled, and researched + digital collage by Rosie Ball.]
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In late November 2025 we held our second-ever Kasai Rooftop Party at the top of the Asuteer building, a huge, open space surrounded by low mountains which, for that Sunday at least, felt like the absolute heart of town. The day boasted beautiful weather and some incredible performances: QOA, Primeiro, dinosawroid-mane, yamanohiroyuki (and many more later in the evening). Right as the sun began to set, everyone sat down to watch New York-based artists Lea Thomas and John Thayer perform music from their new project, Miyaxx.
We were eager to chat with Lea and John afterwards, not only to express our gratitude for their performance, but to discuss another topic of critical importance: the blue of distance. Lea and John released their first collaborative album of that name in 2019, a beautiful blend of folk, ambient, and field recording evoking a introspective journey through distinctly American landscapes. The album artwork, a photo taken by John himself, shows Lea dressed in white and standing on a tidal flat, the sky behind her a cloudy mix of blue, white, and grey. Everything above the earth is hazily reflected in the glassy water under her feet, and if you stare at the photo long enough the colours start bleeding together. Suddenly Lea is hovering in space, the scene turning from earthly and recognisable into something dreamlike and otherworldly.
Blue of Distance by Lea Thomas & John Thayer --- A Field Guide To Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit
Fans of American writer Rebecca Solnit might recognise the album’s title as a reference to her 2005 book ‘A Field Guide to Getting Lost’. In this essay collection, Solnit returns again and again to ‘the blue of distance’: that particular shade of blue that blankets the farthest-reaching corners of our landscape, “the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, the color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away”. This entanglement of distance and blue, of space and light particles, lays the foundation for Solnit’s expansive philosophical explorations. “The color of that distance is the color of an emotion,” she writes, “the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go.”
‘A Field Guide To Getting Lost’ is about so many things. Yearning, desire, memory, and loss. All the subtle and unsubtle ways that landscapes hold onto fragments of the past, the delicate interweaving of geological and human memory. Similarly, when you listen to Lea and John’s album – really their music at large – you will find sonic echoes of the same blue Solnit describes; deep, absorbing, gentle, cool - like a distant memory carried back to us on a breeze. Chatting on the rooftop at Asuteer Kasai, they told us how Solnit’s book had come into their lives by accident, out of the blue. They were at an artist’s residency in a remote desert cabin and it happened to be amongst the small collection of books. They both read it, loved it, and the album was conceived.
When it comes to artistic meditations on blue, the works of Solnit, Lea, and John truly are drops in a vast ocean. Browsing through our own music catalogue, we start to notice blue everywhere we turn. On one hand, it’s not that surprising; this colour and all its emotional significations have long been a rich source of musical inspiration (at least in the English-speaking world... the blues genre appeared in the late 19th century). Still, once you really start digging, it’s almost scandalous how no other colour, no matter how beloved, evocative, or integral to our daily lives, even comes close to reaching the same level of reverence we have for blue. Not even good-looking, passionate red.
What the existence of this immense body of work seems to hypothesise, work that spans every creative discipline across countless generations of artists, is that the colour blue is here to teach us something. Or maybe more accurately, remind us of something. Like a key that could open a compartment deep in our mind, previously locked. In the poet Mary Oliver’s short essay ‘Blue Pastures’ she describes an afternoon spent fishing, the failure to catch anything contributing to the day’s joyful tranquillity. “The sea surrounds us,” she muses, “it surrounds idle conversation; it surrounds the mind diving down into what it hopes is original thought”. Blue is our witness, our companion, and our mirror. But blue can also be the colour of aching, of bruises. In his 2022 song ‘Impossibly Blue’ (from the excellent album Bit By Bit – a favourite at Tobira Records), Evan J Cartwright sings:
"This impossible heart of mine
Never seems to get there on time
The time it takes from me to you
I thought I'd thought it through"
In blue we find both melancholy and tenderness, a sense of transition and of endings. For the protagonist of Han Kang’s novel Greek Lessons, a teacher in the late stages of losing his eyesight, the anticipation of his vision disappearing completely gives the colours surrounding him a mythical, magical quality - especially the soft light of dawn. He writes in a letter to his sister: “…I will see the fabric of darkness unravelled into bluish threads wind about the city – a true spectacle. I’ll polish my glasses and put them on, open both eyes as wide as possible and dip my face in that brief blue light. Do you believe it? My heart is fluttering at the mere thought of it.”
How and why is it that reflected light particles seem to say something so profound about us, about our lives together? For the first instalment of Tobira Listening Diary, we’ll look through our collection at just a few of our favourite musical odes to blue. Some of the following albums and songs locate themselves in the dazzling blue of expansive landscapes, glittering oceans, and deep valleys. Some of them explore blue’s more unsettling modern manifestations - the cold blue light of technology, for example. Some of them are simply about being sad.
Let’s dive in.
[ALBUM] - White Poppy, Sound of Blue (Not Not Fun)
Listen / shop the vinyl here
“Listen to the sound of blue
As it takes over you
There’s nothing you should do
When you’re lost and blue”
Crystal Dorval, aka White Poppy, once famously described her music as ‘therapeutic pop’. In her 2023 album, the second instalment of her ‘Paradise Gardens’ trilogy, she searches for peace, acceptance and emotional integration in the colour blue. Across nine pop-infused shoegaze tracks, Dorval presents the joy and sorrow of life as fraternal twins; not enemies or opposites but co-conspirators. This sentiment is no better captured than in the title of track 7 ‘Melancholic Serenity’, an instrumental that sees atmospheric guitars slowly building over quietly thrumming drums. Lyrically, the rest of these deeply introspective tracks explore themes of mental health, the passing of time, and sustaining hope amidst the emotional rollercoaster of life, and Dorval’s resonant vocals frequently joined by glittering guitars, angelic backing vocals, uplifting drums. It’s gentle pop that envelopes you.
[TRACK] – Fuubutsushi ‘Pool Tile Blue’ (from Meridians - Cached.Media)
Listen / shop the vinyl here
Try Googling ‘pool tile blue’ and not feeling instantly relaxed by the colours, textures, and sparkling luminescence looking back at you. We assume this track from Fuubutsushi’s excellent Meridians was made as homage and testament to this deep blue, which sits anywhere between azure and Yves Klein and mimics the colour of the sky on the hottest day of the year.
[ALBUM] – Annie Hart, Everything Pale Blue (Orindal)
Listen / shop the vinyl here
Annie Hart began composing her 2021 album while completing an artist’s residency in upstate New York. In a short essay accompanying the release, she describes her experience at Aunt Karen’s Farm as one of personal transformation and joyful discovery: “At first I was a bit bored by the same scenery every day in such a gloomy, wet, gray season, but after a while I started seeing the minute daily changes in the nature around me.” The rhythms of the landscape as it shifted and transformed, the leaves on the trees, the ground under her feet - nature’s symbiosis. She had originally set out to finish a pop record, but the sustained attention to her environment inspired her to experiment with her analog synthesizers – a Minimoog Model D, Sequential Prophet-6, and Yamaha CP-20. The result is a gentle collection of ambient compositions that conjure the quiet tranquillity of mountains and forests, reminiscent of Brian Eno and Hiroshi Yoshimura. The album’s title surely is a reference that most ultimate blue - ‘the pale blue dot’, our home, earth itself.
[TRACK] – Laceleaf ‘Shades of Blue’ (from Richie – I’m Into Life)
Listen / shop the cassette here
In ‘Shades of Blue’ Laceleaf kindly guides a lover or friend through what seems to be a dark night of the soul, singing “Baby it’s alright / If you can’t get to sleep tonight / ‘Coz it’s already half-past-two / And soon you’ll see those shades of blue”. The shades of blue he’s describing in this bittersweet track are not purely melancholic, as they’re often portrayed, but rather tinged with the hope of a new day, new beginnings. While the song has elements of slow-core, emo, and fuzzy bedroom pop, melodically it somehow approaches a lullaby. His words seem to call out to us directly: “But now I’m here to stay / I won’t mind when the colors change / I’ll enjoy every shade”
[ALBUM] - Macie Stewart, When the Distance Is Blue (International Anthem)
Listen / shop the vinyl here
Another album inspired by Rebecca Solnit’s work, When the Distance Is Blue is a sonic memory box from Macie Stewart’s own travels far and wide. From Tokyo to Paris to her native US, Stewart speaks of long train journeys through rolling landscapes, sense memories from distant lands, as well as places she’s never been. The label quotes her describing “the feeling when you’re witnessing everything pass outside your window, knowing you may never set foot there”. Rugged compositions made with piano, string quartet, field recordings, and improvisations take us on a journey of our own, recreating that feeling described by both Stewart and Rebecca Solnit before her: of being neither here nor there but somewhere in between.
[TRACK] – Glaskin, ‘Blue Light’ (from Blue Light – CROWD)
Listen / shop the vinyl here
Is blue light modern humanity’s most insidious antagonist? It’s over-stimulating, disrupts our sleep, cause eye strain… but maybe there is a hidden, underrated benefit. Like when you’re a straight edge but you want to dance all night long. That’s how we’re choosing to interpret the title of this track by DJ/producer/brother duo Glaskin.
[ALBUM] – Anagrams, Blue Voices (Balmat)
Listen / shop the vinyl here
Anagrams is a duo consisting of multi-instrumentalists JD Walsh and Jeff Crompton. Their album ‘Blue Voices’ meets in a lush, picturesque valley between jazz and ambient; “it’s not ambient music, but it’s also not not ambient music,” writes label Balmat. We love uncategorizable music in this house. Composed with saxophone, piano, clarinet, guitar, electric lap steel, bass, Moog Matriarch, modular synth (to name just a few instruments used), Blue Voices is a generous, endlessly enjoyable collection of tracks filled with beautiful, calming textures. “Two Voices,” writes Balmat, “discovering a shared language in a hitherto unexplored shade of blue”.
[TRACK] – Green-House, ‘Valley of Blue’ (from Hinterlands – Ghostly International)
Listen / shop the vinyl / cassette
The final track from Green-House’s Hinterlands takes us on a moving, cinematic journey into a ‘Valley of Blue’. Influenced by the Final Fantasy games (it was originally not called ‘Valley of Blue’ but ‘Memory of a Chocobo’), the song has a melancholic and orchestral quality, its melodies and progression simulating a journey through an evolving feeling, as well as a landscape. For a band like Green-House, whose work often presents joyful, soothing, and idyllic depictions of environments real and imagined, ‘Valley of Blue’ is a rare, beautiful depiction of the melancholy that can be reflected in nature, too.
[ALBUM] - Juergen Vonbank, The Blue Soul (Night Defined Recordings)
Listen / shop the vinyl here
In The Blue Soul, Night Defined Recordings label owner and producer Juergen Vonbank explores, as he puts it, “the relationship to the colour blue, the conventional and individual-personal associations with it, as well as the diffuse feeling that this colour is able to convey”. The result is a varied and refreshing collection of soundscapes and textures, from atmospheric, synth-led ambient to pulsing techno. Anna Stoern’s vocals and lyrics feature on the track ‘Apart’, where she describes an internal transformation taking place on, and being reflected in, the rugged shores of a beach. “Salt on my skin / Changing within,” she sings, “Holding space for the wide ocean heart / Drifting deep, drifting apart”. With track titles like ‘E Go’ (ego) and ‘Slf’ (self), and of course title track ‘The Blue Soul’, Vonbank seems to propose that the colour blue could even possibly facilitate a dissolution of self, perhaps through quiet contemplation, reflection, and of course, dancing.
[TRACK] – Zoya Zafar, ‘Blue’ (from Some Songs - Start-track)
Listen / shop the cassette here
Zoya Zafar’s ‘Blue’ depicts the emotional haze of a post-breakup period. The complicated feeling of going no-contact with someone only to miss their voice, despite being the one that ended it, “You never call me, I can’t hear your voice / I don’t remember when it became my choice”. Travelling through coastal towns, not knowing which way to go, all the while ruminating on the past. “I’m stuck reading lines through a blue-lit screen,” Zafar sings, “where we once were all just feelings like a dream”. Blue is everywhere and omnipresent, the ocean, the sky, the glow of our smartphone screens – ever-present for our heartbreaks and our yearning. Luckily, the gentle acoustic melodies and drifting pace of this song feel like an assurance that although the blue of life surrounds us, it won’t consume us.
FURTHER BLUE LISTENING @ TOBIRA RECORDS:
Nick Schofield, Blue Hour (Backward Music)
Nick Harley, Painted Blue (Primordial Void)
NNIS, Deepblue (ststst)
Anthony Calonico, ‘Soft Blue’ (from Spacious Heart - Music From Memory)
IKSRE, ‘esperance (turquoise)’ (from expansions - Imaginary North)
Valance Drakes, ‘The Blue Is an Accumulation of Spirits’ (from Delirious Imagery With Terrifying Truths - AUGHT / VOID)
Aja Monet, ‘Indigo’ (from The Color of Rain – drink sum wtr)
