Cameron Hoefflinger Photo, courtesy of Aster Rhys.
The sound could be New Haven at any hour of the day, but it feels especially like the cold pink of winter daybreak. Crows caw overhead, their cries layered and jagged at the edges. A sweet, shrill chirping comes in beneath them, perhaps a wren singing its hello. Then the instruments enter the fray: whisper-like percussion, an airy flute, guitar and a voice that is muscled and ethereal all at once. There’s something grounded here, and also something otherworldly.
“Crossroads” is the first track on Four Directions, the newest EP from writer, folk artist and New Haven-based musician Aster Rhys. A meditation on the four elements and four cardinal directions, the work takes its listeners on a musical journey, as exquisite and delightful as it is totally unexpected. Along the way, Rhys has created something entirely of her own, with four tracks that demand close listening and deep reflection.
It was recorded and produced at Off The Road Studio in Franklin, Tenn. While Rhys recorded the EP in 2021, she released the work late last fall. Listen to it (and catch her previous EP, MÆTA, inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphosis) here.
“As I sat down with these songs, I asked myself, ‘What does air sound like? What does water sound like? What does fire sound like?" she recalled in a recent interview about the track “Ocean Deep,” the third track on the EP. “It started to take shape in the waves and the tides, this siren-esque old world melody emerging … it’s also blurring the lines between reality and fantasy.”
While Rhys released the EP last fall, Four Directions has been years in the making. As a young artist, she started playing the guitar when she was around 14, and singing seriously a few years later in high school. By then, she was also writing poetry and music, delighted by the worlds she was able to unlock with a pen and a page and some lyrics. At home, she was often surrounded by music (“my parents were casual listeners,” she said), increasingly thoughtful about the role it played in weaving together her Irish and Caribbean roots.
“In my relationship to music, there was time for reflection, investigation, literal just quiet,” she recalled. “And the question of ‘What am I drawn to?’”
Then in the years leading up to the Covid-19 pandemic, Rhys was living and working in California, where she was also in a long-term relationship. In early 2020, she left California for Michigan and ended the relationship, with a plan to backpack across Europe and rediscover herself in the process. She’d purchased the backpack; she had a one-way ticket to London ready to go. And then in March, the Covid-19 pandemic hit the U.S., putting those plans abruptly on hold.
Rhys started spending more time in and with the elements—earth, water, air, and fire—with daily trips into nature that bloomed into a love for hiking and camping. She reconnected with her former partner, first in a series of phone calls and then in-person during the summer of 2020. The idea of Four Directions, a “kind of saga” that was also a musical journey, began to bubble to the surface. Many of the songs were drafted or edited in nature, from a beach in New Hampshire to a fire close to the Long Island Sound.
“I had to learn, really, how to flow, be patient,” she recalled on a recent episode of WNHH Community Radio’s “Arts Respond,” a collaboration with the Arts Council of Greater New Haven. “This kind of lens that I was approaching that time with, on exploring the external world, became more kind of focused on the internal world. It became very nature-based.”
The result was not only Rhys’ gradual journey back to the East Coast—the artist grew up in New Jersey—but also four songs that take the listener on a dynamic musical journey. In “Crossroads,” for instance, Rhys folds in the sounds of nature from the jump, letting her voice weave in and out of birdsong and instrumentals until it becomes something entirely of its own.
By and by, the Eastern wind, it calls you, she sings, and a listener can almost feel it. The song's expansiveness is part of the point: Rhys wanted the piece to feel open and airy, with Irish flute and long, emotive singing that gives it a witchy, earthy vibe. By and by, the Eastern wind, it calls you.
Moments later, she nearly cries out, and it’s not hard to imagine her in the woods somewhere, her head thrown back as curls pour past her shoulders and air rushes from her lungs out into the open. There’s a power there that is earwormy and intoxicating: a listener hangs on to her voice because it feels like a trustworthy guide, and also because they need to see what she does next.
The musician is just getting started. For Rhys, “Crossroads” is not just a strong first impression—a literal sonic crossroads—but also a door and a window, inviting a listener to step into this world and stick around for the ride. Between birdsong, flute and percussion, she’s a gifted storyteller, with a folksy, ensorcelled sort of flair that makes it feel like a bodhrán, a harp and a time machine might show up at any moment. Her lyrics, meanwhile, feel old-world and poetic, with layers that ask for multiple listens.
That sense of intention suffuses the whole EP. In an homage to the earth titled “Standing Stones,” there’s something straight-talking and fiercely strong, even sturdy, about Rhys’ voice, and she owns it (it does not come as a surprise that Ani DiFranco is one of her favorite artists). In “Ocean Deep,” it is urgent and pressed, leaning into a sea shanty vibe that also feels divine. By the end, “Knife’s Edge,” she’s barreling forward at full force, closing out the EP with a heart-pounding pace and vocal heat that sounds like the fire it is channeling.
Taken together and apart, the four tracks have given her a renewed sense of kinship with the world around her. Each begins with a nod to the element it is honoring—the sound of grinding, rolling rocks in “Stranding Stones,” lapping waves in “Ocean Deep,” the sharp crackle of fire in “Knife’s Edge”—grounding both Rhys and her listeners in the increasingly endangered world that they share. All are recorded outside (including in New Haven), imprinting the EP with a specific sound memory in a world that feels very much on fire.
That reverence for the planet is a long-held love. Growing up in the suburbs of New Jersey, “I found myself feeling that sense of yearning for more,” she said. As a kid, she would venture into the woods as often as she could, communing with the world around her. Years later, nature is still a creative refuge, the place where she does much of her drafting and songwriting. She thinks of herself as actively climate-conscious, from volunteer work in renewable agriculture to hours researching the very real and immediate, physical impacts of climate change.
“That is a question I think a lot about for myself, and also for the broader world,” she said. “If we were more in a model of kinship with nature, would we be treating the land, trees, what we call ‘resources,’ in that way, if they’re actually a sense of bodily relationship.”
“Something that comes through, I think, in my songs is kind of bridging this gap,” she added. “Oftentimes there’s this divide between the human and the non-human … [this is] actually showing the ways that air and water and fire and earth can have a particular sound, a particular resonance, in the body.”
Now that the work is out in the world, she added, she’s turned her attention toward a new project, about which she remains relatively tight-lipped (she is also the lead vocalist on The Mercy Velvet Project, helmed by New Havener Alexis Robbins, which she called a “sublime” experience that will continue to evolve in 2025). For her, it’s part of making meaning in a world turned on its head—and sharing that with anyone who is willing to listen.
To hear more about Four Directions and Rhys’ wider oeuvre and sources of inspiration, listen to an episode of WNHH Community Radio’s “Arts Respond,” a collaboration with the Arts Council of Greater New Haven, above. Listen to the EP here.