Let the Landscape Hold Your Grief
“Let the Landscape Hold Your Grief” is the debut album of Michigan-based electronic artist bioPrism (Josh Epperly). The album was largely written in 2025, a year that dramatically accelerated the loss of wild places, social trust, and functional institutions. The same year was also a period of transformation for the artist, who found resiliency within himself and his community. Acknowledging these dual realities, “Let the Landscape Hold Your Grief” is an exploration of the inner terrain of grief and a testament to hope amidst chaos. The album represents a cyclical journey that the artist repeats many times over, one that begins in isolation and returns to interrelationship.
The artist mostly departs from the rhythmic structures of his previous releases in favor of ambient and experimental soundscapes. Throughout the album, noise and melody, light and dark, the digital and the acoustic are carefully balanced. This balancing act is apparent in the opening track “everyday sirens”, in which a field recording of tornado sirens is blended with an analog synthesizer that spectrally imitates the field recording. During composition of the album, the artist fell in love with audio feedback, which he harnessed in tracks such as “erupt” and “gyre” to express the self-reinforcing nature of anger and anxiety. Acoustic, granular textures offer warmer emotional counterpoints in tracks such as “microcosmos” and “interbeing”. Finally, the album includes collaborations with vocalist Cassandra Cohen on “distances collapse”, vocalist Rachel Epperly on “tidesong”, and percussionist Evan Gedert on “interbeing”. The artist offers gratitude to all the friends, family, community members, forests, and rivers who made this album possible.