004 Music for Plant Care

At Stack Records, we believe music is more than just sound—it’s a mood, a moment, a companion to your daily rituals.

Plant Care is a calm and steady playlist built with ambient tones and soft rhythms for quiet routines and slow moments. Tend to your space, let thoughts wander or let your day unfold at its own pace. We cherish the experience of immersing ourselves in full albums. This playlist offers a gentle introduction to each featured album. Happy exploring, and may your plants thrive!

Mood: TUNING IN

Best for: Plant Care · Mornings · Journaling · Being

Tracklist:

1. Birds of Borneo - Gaiaphilia – Yumiko Morioka & Takashi Kokubo

2. Made in Dreams - Ways To The Deep Meadow – Ocean Moon

3. Ultra-terrestrial Yearning - Perfectly Beneath Us – Celer

4. 8C - Whatever The Weather II – Whatever The Weather

5. Fall - Elements of Nature – Felbm

6. Rain Boundaries - Moon Under Current – Tomotsugu Nakamura

7. Bethlehem (Glimpse) - Glimpses of Infinity – Laraaji

8. Gradation of Dawn - Dawn – Shinji Wakasa

9. Intergalactic Warp Terminal 222 - Gifts – Lionmilk

10. Leaving / Arriving - Sou -– Yanaco

11. Listening - Above Alone in The Sky – Joel Shearer, Stewart Cole

12. Ocean Flow - Migratory – Masayoshi Fujita

13. In The Afternoon - Nova+ – Yutaka Hirose

14. Enviroment 1 - S.W.I.M - Gunnar Jónsson Collider

15. Satie on The Grass - Flora – Hiroshi Yoshimura

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Gaiaphilia - Yumiko Morioka & Takashi Kokubo

Japanese artists Yumiko Morioka and Takashi Kokubo unite for Gaiaphilia, a journey through ambient soundscapes that seamlessly blends Morioka’s graceful piano compositions with Kokubo’s immersive field recordings and atmospheric synthesisers.

“From our love and concern for our planet, we both offer a unique sensibility and spirit of inquiry which we express through our music.”

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Ways To The Deep Meadow - Ocean Moon

The title 'Ways To The Deep Meadow' is inspired by the poem 'Universal Solar Calendar' written by poet, mystic, shaman, and visionary Angus Maclise.

This music seeks to nurture an optimistic outlook in the listener, something he achieves here with subtlety and a truly delicate touch. The immersive ambient music of 'Ways To The Deep Meadow' reaches out to the listener like gentle trails of light, offering it's spells, invocations and enchantments to all who choose to listen.

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Perfectly Beneath Us - Celer [Field Records]

With such a sizeable library of sounds to explore, the reissue of Perfectly Beneath Us serves as an ideal entry point into the middle period of Celer's catalogue, presenting four pieces of sustaining, lethargic movements, wreaked in profound subtlety.

This captivating piece of work rewards the attentive listener as much as it soothes the casual drifter. Now beautifully framed on a carefully considered reissue, this record fits neatly with the label's own repertoire of evocative, subliminal electronics.

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Whatever The Weather - Whatever The Weather II

On Whatever The Weather II, rich worlds of layered textures flow seamlessly from hypnotic ambience, to mottled rhythms, to cut-up collages of diaristic field recordings. The result is a uniquely fractured beauty, born from a compelling union of organic and human elements, processed through a variety of digital and analogue methods. James titled Whatever The Weather pieces based on an innate sense of their “emotional temperature” at the time of recording, but she notes that often, upon revisiting them, they will feel somewhere else entirely on the thermometer; such are the whims of the environment. Compared to the album’s predecessor and its Antarctic imagery, though, Whatever The Weather II is a warmer outing, as signaled by the desert clime of its cover photo which is once again shot by Collin Hughes, and the package designed by Justin Hunt Sloane.

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Elements of Nature - Felbm

In January 2021, Eelco Topper (Felbm) went into hermit mode by way of a two-week residency at Buitenplaats Doornburgh, a former monastery on the outskirts of his hometown of Utrecht, Netherlands. He had already intended to use only natural elements for inspiration, such as naturally-occurring textures and patterns, and the earthiness of acoustic instruments like singing bowls and a range of wooden percussion.

On arrival, the contemplative architecture of the building and the peace of the surrounding landscapes energized Topper so much that these initial ideas blossomed into nearly 50 minutes of intimate 4-track cassette recordings.

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Moon Under Current - Tomotsugu Nakamura

Japanese ambient woven with organic minimal sounds and field recordings. This marks the fourth vinyl release from Japanese ambient artist Tomotsugu Nakamura. His previous vinyl releases with prominent French ambient label LAAPS and other international labels have consistently sold out. This bold project delves into the fusion of sound and music, employing acoustic elements and analog synthesis within a spatial framework.

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Glimpses of Infinity - Laraaji

Segue To Infinity (Glimpse) is a peek into the very start of Laraaji’s remarkable catalog, a small piece of the upcoming 4LP Segue To Infinity — his 1978 debut when he was still known as Edward Larry Gordon, Celestial Vibration, and six more side-long studio sessions from recently discovered acetates from the same time period. To mark this momentous new box set we’re releasing single-length excerpts — stand alone “Glimpses” of some of the first thoughts and best thoughts of one of new age’s originators and masters.

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Dawn - Shinji Wakasa

Shinji Wakasa's "Dawn" is a conceptual ambient music album inspired by the ancient Chinese poem "The Fisherman" and the picture book "Dawn" by Uri Shulevitz, which uses this poem as its original title. In Shulevitz's picture book, a beautifully evolving world at daybreak is depicted with very beautiful colour usage and minimal words. Wakasa undertook the creation of this album to express the world of this picture book and the original poem through sound.

In producing the music for this album, Wakasa set a very simple rule for himself: to create in the early morning using the clear awareness of the morning, to play what he felt at that moment without denying the first sound, and to build the music like flowing clouds, a concept expressed in Japanese Zen as "flowing clouds and water."

This approach has successfully imbued the entire album with a sense of freedom and a gradation that transitions from the pitch-black sky gradually illuminated by the sun's light, turning from blue to green to yellow.

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Intergalactic Warp Terminal 222 - Lionmilk

The record begins with a radio transmission from the depths of Lionmilk’s celestial innerspace—“Hello. Is anybody out there? This is Lionmilk speaking, and you are tuned into the Intergalactic Warp Terminal 222. Standby. We are commencing broadcast”—a retro sci-fi movie motif that recurs throughout Intergalactic Warp Terminal 222’s 26 tracks. But space travel here functions more-so as a metaphor for deep soul work, for journeying inward, through the vast unknowns of one’s own consciousness. What follows is an intimate, diaristic song suite, grounded in the struggle to keep our hearts alive and open amidst an onslaught of daily indignities.

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Leaving / Arriving - yanaco

"Leaving / Arriving" is the second full-length album by Tokyo-based electronic musician Yanaco, released on November 29, 2024, under the P-Vine label. This album follows his debut EP "tttwoface" (2022) and his first full album "Colors" (2023). The album features a blend of samples, programmed electronics, and synth pads, creating a serene atmosphere reminiscent of artists like Hiroshi Yoshimura and Aphex Twin. It explores the theme of life's journey from "Leaving" to "Arriving," offering a cohesive listening experience.

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Listening - Joel Shearer

Joel Shearer’s Listening Immerses Itself in Ambient Guitar, Restraint, and the Beauty of Repetition. With guitarist and ambient composer Joel Shearer’s new album, Listening, he took the path of repetition, subtle movement, and pure sound rather than conventional songwriting. What began as a disciplined experiment — limiting himself to just electric guitar — soon expanded. At various points, he introduced piano, cello, and trumpet, allowing the record to evolve organically. "I didn’t know I was making another record,” Shearer says. “I was experimenting, wanting to do something beyond just the electric guitar. So, I started these other tracks, and that’s how Listening came about.”

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Migratory - Masayoshi Fujita

Nature has always been a source of inspiration for Fujita, and on Migratory it takes centre stage. You can hear it on the album’s peaceful and considered field recordings, but most importantly, Masayoshi highlights – “nature is there as the image to be evoked by the listener from the music.” On the record’s sleeve notes, written by renowned novelist and travel writer Pico Iyer, we learn about the Japan that he hears as he sits down and listens to the music. It educates and encapsulates us, in the same way Fujita’s imaginary birds vividly depict the essence of musical migration. 

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Nova + - Yutaka Hirose

NOVA + 4 is a transcendent experience of nature in the urban context, an oeuvre which, much like Midori Takada’s Through The Looking Glass or Satoshi Ashikawa’s Still Way, holds the power to appease the soul in turbulent times. As one inspired YouTube commenter once said when describing Yutaka Hirose’s masterstroke: "I can't tell if the birds are singing inside or outside! Thank you!"

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S​.​W​.​I​.​M. - Gunnar Jónsson Collider

Inviting escapism through detailed, glacial textures, S.W.I.M. elevates a traditional beatless spectrum into a first-person narrative, moving across burning wastelands, miles-high sundown, a dizzying night sky, subterranean exploration, and more beautiful, natural phenomena. Subtle changes in tone and texture across each of the six environments provide a signal of the destination’s energy and the intended perception of the traveler. At times, elated and dwarfed by nature’s surrounding grandeur. Other times, bestowing a sense of apprehension and unknowing.

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Flora - Hiroshi Yoshimura

Flora is chronologically and stylistically a follow-up to Hiroshi Yoshimura’s acclaimed 1986 works Green and Surround, wherein Yoshimura continues to play with the ambience of sound and the sound of ambience, underscoring his mastery in the field of environmental music. Listening to Flora is like taking a stroll in a park, absorbing the colours and textures of the natural environment—flowers, insects, the swaying of the leaves—as Yoshimura often did at his beloved Edo-era park near his home in Tokyo. As Junichi Konuma describes in his liner notes, Yoshimura’s music “only begins to emerge as it exists at the intersection of passive and active.” Yoshimura's approach to sound and melody invites the listener to hear the intricacies of the music with intent, while simultaneously allowing the aural textures to exist as part of the background of our everyday life.

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All titles currently available at Stack Records — www.stackrecords.co.nz. If any titles go out of stock, flick us a message and we’ll see if we can hunt down more copies.