While concurrently working on a more
song-oriented album, Virginia Astley conceived
From Gardens Where We Feel Secure as a separate instrumental project which she intended to evoke the feeling of a summer day.
Zoo Records co-founder
Bill Drummond had previously suggested that Astley record an instrumental album for his label, but after Astley lost contact with Drummond, she undertook the project independently. Astley later stated that she had not originally pictured it as her debut album, and recorded it "as a side project" because she "decided it would be nice to do something about summer". From April to June 1982, Astley and her co-producer
Russell Webb made various trips to the
Moulsford and
South Stoke countrysides to make
field recordings of assorted natural sounds. Most of these were captured during one week in late April using a rented portable
Uher tape machine, with a more "ordinary" recorder being used for later visits. Working in Astley's father
Edwin's
eight-track home studio in Moulsford, Astley and Webb recorded music – the former on piano and flute, and the latter on acoustic and electric guitar – over their field recordings, and used
tape manipulation to achieve desired effects and speeds. Astley's nieces
Emma Townshend and Aminta Townshend provided additional backing vocals, while Jo Wells of
Kissing the Pink played clarinet on the track "Hiding in the Ha-Ha". Afterwards, Astley booked a separate studio for several days to mix the album. Astley recalled that although mixing proved to be a costlier process than recording, the album overall "didn't cost very much in relative terms", while the self-funded nature of the project allowed her to retain ownership of the album's
master recordings. A largely instrumental work,
From Gardens Where We Feel Secure has been described as an album of
pastoral ambient music. Its tracks are
tone poems that collectively evoke the progression of a summer day from dawn to dusk, with the album being divided into two sections, "Morning" and "Afternoon". The music on the album was entirely
improvised, with Astley explaining that "the only thing I had planned beforehand was to create an atmosphere – just create this really heavy-with-summer atmosphere", and that she wanted "to have something that's played at a quiet level that's not in-your-face and you're not listening to the lyrics... that's always what this album was meant to be – played quietly."
From Gardens Where We Feel Secure, its title track, and the track "Out on the Lawn I Lie in Bed" were named after lines from the
W. H. Auden poem "A Summer Night", while "When the Fields Were Burning" was inspired by Astley's mother's recollection of a dream in which firemen extinguished a blaze caused by
stubble burning. ==Release==