Crammed discs news - Amatorski - The Garden Reworks

The Garden Reworks takes the instrumental track The Garden by Amatorski - released on their latest album Curves and Bends, Things Veer - as an inspiration for a series of new pieces created by sound artists and composers Kate Carr, Ki Oni, Liew Niyomkarn, pantea and Theo Nugraha. Mastering was done by Stephan Mathieu from Studio Schwebung.

Inspired by a memorable visit to Derek Jarman's garden, his film The Garden and his diaries in Modern Nature, the album extends into a broader reflection on how we inhabit and listen to garden environments.

It explores the garden as a site of communal practice, nourishment, healing, activism, and other ways of engaging with nature - where musical composition meets recordings, textures, and impressions of lived landscapes, exploring the shifting relationships between experimentation, intention, the artificial, the mythological, and the more-than-human world.

Additional context (track, rework album, performance): The instrumental track, rework album, and performance grow out of an ongoing exploration of how gardens, landscape, and nature are understood. They are informed by research into the religious, social, and political shifts of the 1500s and the emergence of early landscape painting, as well as a visit to Derek Jarman's garden at Prospect Cottage, Olivia Laing's The Garden Against Time, and numerous other references.

About Amatorski
Amatorski, founded in 2007 by Inne Eysermans, extends a pop sensibility into explorations of ambient sound and environmental ideas in both composition and performance. Their trajectory runs from early,widely celebrated releases to the 2024 album Curves and Bends, Things Veer, while maintaining a process-driven exploration of song, sound and its surroundings. The release of The Garden EP in the fall of 2026 will anchor their shift in sound and worldbuilding, preparing the ground for a new album set for release in 2027.

Listen to The Garden Reworks - EP by Amatorski | Spotify

Collaborators
Liew Niyomkarn
Liew Niyomkarn is a sound artist and composer based between Brussels and Bangkok. Her experimental practice explores sound, resonance, repetition and alternative tuning systems through acoustic instruments such as the zither and lyre. Combining these with field recordings, she creates immersive works that reflect on memory, time, slowness and nostalgia. Her work takes the form of live performances and sound installations.
Theo Nugraha
Theo is an artist, producer and organizer from Samarinda, Indonesia, active in the experimental sound scene since 2013. His multidisciplinary practice explores sound, the body and visual experimentation, often through collaborative and cross-disciplinary work. With nearly 200 releases to his name, he is also involved in performance art, visual experimentation and several initiatives supporting sound and visual artists across Asia
pantea
pantea is a cultural worker, creator and writer whose practice explores how sound can express ecological connections, collective memory and forms of unheard experience. Working across sound, writing and collaborative practices, she draws on everyday life, field recordings and sonic heritage, with a particular focus on Iranian sound culture. She is involved in the Khamoosh community and the Active Listeners Club music label, and is currently pursuing a practice-based PhD in Music at St George's, University of London.
Kate Carr
Kate Carr is a London-based sound artist and composer working across composition, performance and installation. Her practice explores field recordings, environmental sounds and everyday sonic encounters, often combining recorded material with live performance, experimental techniques and instruments made from discarded objects. Her intimate and layered sound works blur the boundaries between documentation, fiction and field recording, exploring sound as a relational and collective experience.
Ki Oni
Ki Oni is the pseudonym of LA-based artist Chuck Soo-Hoo. His practice explores the space between the natural and artificial worlds, creating surreal and fluid soundscapes where organic elements, field recordings and electronic textures intertwine. Drawing from both environmental sounds and experimental music, his work inhabits a liminal space where sound becomes a flowing, transformative experience.

Anne Reijniers (artwork)
Anne Reijniers is a Belgian filmmaker, curator and farmer whose practice explores collective filmmaking, decolonisation and ecological forms of resistance rooted in care. Her work connects cinema and agriculture through collaborative projects, gardening and alternative approaches to image-making. Since 2023, she has been experimenting with plant-based processes for developing film and photo negatives, drawing directly from her work with the land.