Heaven's Arms

Available on iTunes.
Information for Media

Welcome to my website and my second full length album.  Heaven's Arms has been a year and a half in the making over 2012 and 2013.  It is a trip through the cosmic.  The album is an aural feast, a walk into the mist laden forest of mythic and spiritual space inspired by passage, transformation, and the exotic.  It is an album filled with the transcendental aura of two countries, Canada and Australia.

How You As a Patron Are Helping: A portion of the proceeds from album sales are being donated to YESS, which is a not-for-profit organization unconditionally devoted to helping youth facing difficult realities, and provides emergency shelter.

For those of you in Edmonton or Alberta, my album is also on sale at Tix On The Square, and all the proceeds from Tix sales are being donated to YESS.  See my album Solitaire for the similar sponsor program to iHuman Youth Society.

For others that would like a physical copy of the album you can contact me at: vaughan [at] vaughanhoystudio.com (don't forget the '@' symbol).  Album copies are $15.00 Canadian which includes handling and postage, $12.00 in store or from me by hand.

Credits

Music composed and produced by Vaughan Hoy
Vaughan Hoy, acoustic and electric guitars, eBow, harmonica, acoustic cello, rain stick, singing bowls, vocals
Stephanie Badgley, vocals
Nadir Bellahmer, violin, viola, percussion

There have been some amazing collaborations on this album.  I would like to especially thank Stephanie Badgley and Nadir Bellahmer for their artistry, spirit, and friendship.

Original Ambient Sounds: Exotic birds and storm recorded at Ravenswood, Western Australia on the Murray River 2012.  Indian Ocean recorded at Doddies Beach, Mandurah, Western Australia 2012.  Night crickets recorded at Balsam Lake, Ontario 2011.  Airport environment recorded at Hong Kong International Airport on consecutive occasions in 2012.

Recorded and mixed at FOSS Music, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada 2012 - 2013, and FOSS Music Mobile, Ravenswood, Western Australia May - June 2012 and September - November 2012.

Mastered by Joao Carvalho Studios and Indie Pool, Toronto, Canada
Manufacturing by Indie Pool
Band Photographs by Jim Dobie Photography
Album artwork by Vaughan Hoy Studio in collaboration with Tyler Vreeling at Fat Crow Design
All rights reserved.  Copyright Vaughan Hoy / Vaughan Hoy Studio / FOSS Music

Here's the album artwork.  Click on the pictures and scroll through full size images.

About the album.  Started at home in Edmonton at the middle of 2012 I loosely had the idea of creating a second environmental album that conveyed a geographical quality, spirit of two places, and experience of passage through two countries that have been formative in my life, Australia and Canada. Twice in 2012 I was called back to Western Australia to be with my mother at her home in Ravenswood, WA, once in May / June of 2012 and again in September / November 2012.  The second trip was to be with my brother to help our mother pass.  I can't describe the experience in words……..only through the music.

The last trip ended an era, an amazing family saga, and opened another new door to somewhere……………..

The pieces on this album traverse my travelling back and forth between these two poles and through the world in between.  Bark was recorded when I returned to Edmonton from saying goodbye to my last parent and was essentially a primal scream that had been bottled away for some time.  Ion Rain comes from the experience of moving between drastically different environments in our contemporary age where time is condensed, change through travel is compressed, and urbanity becomes an airport.  On the last trip home of 2012, flying over the Rocky Mountains at night my plane flew beside an Aurora Borealis the size of the Grand Canyon, the pilot turned the cabin lights off and I thought about how much experience of place had been compressed into 27 hours.

Flying home to Canada in early 2012 I met a new friend on the plane who had been up near the Gold Coast doing environmental research.  As we flew over the Pacific Ocean, I saw out my window for the first time, an Atoll. My new friend told me about how Darwin is actually most famous for his first discovery and treatise, which was on the phenomenon of the atoll, before the more commonly popularized story of On The Origin of Species.  The atoll as the story goes, is a coral reef that forms around a volcano after it has become inactive and slowly recedes into the sea. As we floated slowly by 38,000 feet in the air I was breath taken seeing this ancient thing juxtaposed against a curving horizon.

Indian Ocean Raga No 1-Welcoming The Morning is about………..well……….the internal lyrical motion of the sea that affects all of us on the planet.  There's A Blue Place In Heaven is commemorative.  In summer 2012 in the town I live, a 7 year old child drowned at a public pool.  A very tragic accident…….like all accidents.  What struck me was that this child was a ward of the court system and seemed to have no one there looking over them even though they were in a crowded public swimming pool.  I think a great deal about all the children in the world that are abandoned, miss treated, uncared for, in dire circumstances, for which we all suffer as beings…………….and wrote this piece.  For sure Heaven has a blue place.

Helen is about an elder friend I met a long time ago while I was living in the Gulf Islands in British Columbia.  We became friends for many years after meeting on a ferry, and where ever we were and life took us we managed to see each other, walk and talk about great artists, philosophers, music, writers, many she had met in her life-like Krishnamurti, all of which she had some amazing stories to tell afresh each time we met.  Being a private person, at the end of her life I think she would have wanted me to remember her as she was in our times together, so I never knew how she passed, tried to contact her family but had no reply.  So this is my blessing to her and my closure.

Wilga is about the tiny bush town in Western Australia where my brother and I grew up. Time stretched out further than the horizon.  Lots of things happened but there was a luminous quality of suspension in time in a place that probably didn't have more than 20 people scattered about in it.  Like so many small rural bush places the store was the post office, gas station, bank, and centre of things besides the saw mill, town hall and church. We lived by kerosene lights and wood burning stove, a traditional outhouse, and electricity didn't come to us until I had moved away.  It was magical and left me with a deep appreciation of nature and the power of place.

The album closes with Up River.  I think it carries the effervescent qualities that I came to know that surrounds my parents home on the Murray River in WA.  They found this bare patch of sand along the riverbank and made something out of it from scratch over many years, this is Ravenswood. The Murray is an estuary river.  Ocean tides push salt water and salt water life up river creating an amazing diverse habitat for dolphins, pelicans, and a range of fresh and salt water animals and exotic birds. It is breath taking.  Ravenswood became the extension of my connection to Western Australia from our beginnings in Wilga.

I hope you enjoy this album and would love to hear from you.

Vaughan