Central New York composer Early Fern produces dense, melodic ambient music drawn from pastoral experience. Her three albums on UK based Métron Records were drawn from her experiences as a transitory, itinerant farmworker. Across her albums for Métron, she gradually crystallized a multitrack recording and composition process using synthesizers, samplers, bass guitar, and field recordings. These releases culminated in Perpetual Care (2023), which explored feelings of grief and loss after leaving a beautiful environment following an eviction caused by a labor dispute. Memory Garden (2024) on Aural Canyon, explored minimal and neoclassical synth arrangements, still drawn from agricultural experience and focusing on the repetitive experiences of daily life. Wetland Interiors (2025), forthcoming on sound as language, is an album of music in praise of Central New York's wetland environments, with influences drawn from early music, post-minimalism, Japanese environmental music, folk, and jazz. Her music has been featured on Bandcamp's Best Of: Ambient, the Foxy Digitalis podcast, Marine Eyes' Cloud Collecting Substack, and in Electronic Sound Mag, and she has been played on KEXP and BBC Radio. She rarely appears live, but has given performances in University Auditoriums, DIY spaces, record stores, and professional venues. She has collaborated on music with Joseph Shabason and Saapato, and has a forthcoming sound collage project exploring rural relationships to climate catastrophe with social practice artist Dawn Weleski.
