why we love this

Piano tones, guitar lines, and faint passing sounds gather like memories brought back by touch and sound. It feels like walking through a house you know by heart, noticing how the rooms open differently now.

about the record

Artist and multi-instrumentalist Realf Heygate makes music as Flaer. On his first full-length, Translations, he embraces the search for quiet miracles.

In 2023, he released the mini-album Preludes on ODDA, composed on his mother’s piano and his childhood cello. Returning to the label for Translations, Heygate looks in a new direction with a record shaped by transition and movement, more internal in nature, less rooted in a single place, and reflective of the process of laying new foundations in Cornwall.

Like Preludes, Translations is colored with found sounds and field recordings, from the starlings heard singing through the open window of his studio to the brittle recordings of his mother, a linguist, learning Spanish on a set of language tapes. In both cases, Heygate embraces the translations and memories embedded in the sounds.

“When I digitized my mother’s tapes, they warped and stuttered in a very similar way to the starlings’ song,” he explains. “They had this uncanny rhythm and pulse that I couldn’t quite decode, but felt like they were saying something.” These decayed transmissions hint at loss, resisting clarity in favor 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 piece and “Starling Descends,” a reference to Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending, act as a bridge away from the pastoral themes of Preludes toward a more assertive sound. At times intimate in its textured instrumentation and at others more overtly grand in orchestration, the album reflects a widening palette of influences.

“Flaer began when I picked up my mother’s instruments, seeking a form of reconnection. Where words failed 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 describes as “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 developing in his visual practice. 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 will be, and I never really find what it is.”