Album Notes

With much water gone under the bridge, Esther Sprikkelman and Harry Otten have known each other since childhood - Esther was a pubsescent punk, screaming slogans against queen and country whilst Harry was the slightly older guru-with-guitar figure. Time was these people could be relied on to have everything turned up full and damn the neighbours. These days the neighbours are untroubled: the noises now made by Esther & Harry are an altogether quieter thing. Yes, Safe Home is most definitely quiet, yet listening to the music made by Safe Home is most definitely a disquieting experience… In 2001 Safe Home released a series of five 7" singles on their own Angels In Space micro-label, and, when these records (now sought-after and increasingly hard to find) were sold out, issued the tracks, together with new recordings, as the album "You Can't Undo What's Already Undid", released by Sunday Records of Illinois early in 2002. Described at the time as "'Paradise Lost' as performed by Alice", the album was "a quiet little melancholia for electro-burble, cyclical guitars, harmonium and the distant intimacy of a faraway-so-close voice": this was not summertime music. Avoided by even the non-establishment music establishment at home in Holland, "You Can't Undo What's Already Undid" was well-received elsewhere, and work began on a second full-length set, eventually completed as "The Wide Wide World And All We Know". Once again, and this time perhaps even more so, the sound of Safe Home is an uncomfortable mixture of melancholy and longing: Harry Otten's glacial arrangements of understated guitars weave and loop as Esther Sprikkelman's always impressionistic lyrics leave plenty of room for the listener to conjure up his or her own personal claustrophobia. The water passing under the Safe Home bridge seems to be oddly treacherous - not violent and heaving, but with an insidious undercurrent hidden in the blackness; crossing it offers a dry passage only to those who dare not look down.