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Odda Recordings

Translations

by Flaer

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    Limited print is one of five variants, made by Flaer. Signed edition of 500.

    Includes unlimited streaming of Translations via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    Download available in 24-bit/44.1kHz.
    ships out within 5 days
    edition of 500 
    Purchasable with gift card

      £23 GBP or more 

     

  • Record/Vinyl + Digital Album

    Includes unlimited streaming of Translations via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    Download available in 24-bit/44.1kHz.
    ships out within 5 days
    Purchasable with gift card

      £20 GBP or more 

     

1.
Entre 03:16
2.
3.
Souvenir 02:52
4.
Our Hands 03:13
5.
Air Loom 02:46
6.
Anagram 04:20
7.
America 03:11
8.
Translation 04:56
9.
Land Ends 03:12
10.
11.

about

Artist and multi-instrumentalist Flaer embraces the search for quiet miracles on first LP Translations.

In 2023, Realf Heygate - who makes music as Flaer - released his debut mini-album Preludes, composed on his mother’s piano and his childhood cello. Returning to ODDA for his debut full-length album, Heygate is now looking in another direction.

A record that embraces transition and movement, Translations is in many ways more internal, less rooted to a single place and reflective of the process of laying new foundations in Cornwall.

Like Preludes, Translations is coloured with found sounds and field recordings, from the starlings which can be heard singing through the open window of his studio, to the brittle recordings of his mother, who was a linguist, learning Spanish on a set of language tapes. In both cases, Heygate embraced the translations and memories inherent to the sounds.

“When I digitised my mother’s tapes, they warped and stuttered in a very similar way to the starling’s song,” he explains. “They had this uncanny rhythm and pulse that I couldn’t quite decode, but was saying something." These decayed transmissions hint at loss, resisting clarity in favour of the ineffable.

Translations is also a record of ambiguities and in-betweens, suggested by the double meaning of the album’s opening track ‘Entre’. At once intricate and expansive, threaded with birdsong and acoustic guitar motifs, this and ‘Starling Descends’ (a reference to Vaughan Williams’ ‘The Lark Ascending’) act as a bridge away from the pastoral themes of Preludes towards a more assertive sound. At times intimate in its textured instrumentation and at others more overtly grand in orchestration, reflecting a wider palette of influences.

“Flaer began in many ways when I picked up my mother’s instruments, seeking a form of reconnection. Where words evaded me, they became the tools through which I found a language for grief – and above all, for love.”

Recorded between 2023 and 2025 – what Heygate calls “A gradual process of sowing and harvesting ideas rather than a single intense creative period” - each track follows a rhythm similar to the small maquettes and sculptures he has been working on in his visual practice, whereby structures and melodies form intuitively in moments that are as rare as they are fleeting.

“It's that feeling of searching that I really enjoy,” Heygate continues. “I never know what the destination of the composition is going to be, and I never really find what it is."

credits

released September 12, 2025

Written and produced by Realf Heygate
Artwork by Realf Heygate and Ash Kinnard
Mastered by Lewis Hopkin
Dedicated to Emma Greville-Heygate

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Flaer England, UK

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