Emily A. Sprague on Therapy, Being Present, and the Intentionality of Ambient

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Let's get right into the first newsletter of 2026: I've been a big fan of Emily A. Sprague since Florist's spellbinding second album If Blue Could Be Happiness in 2017, and alongside her work in that group she's also put out records under her own name that have truly set her apart in the ever-crowded field of ambient music. Her latest, Cloud Time, dropped just a few months ago via the always-esteemed RVNG Intl. label, and before the year was out I hopped on a call with her to talk about everything regarding this new album as well as her very impressive career in general. Check it out:

You recently moved back to upstate New York after living out in L.A. for a bit. What prompted the move?
It was mostly to do with wanting to be close to my father who lives out here. The pandemic was a bit of a catalyst for taking the action. When I moved out to California, I knew I'd always end up back. When the pandemic started, I made Hill, Flower, Fog, which was a mix of being home and realizing how much I do value in that kind of slowing down, which I think a lot of people experienced as well. But it was hard. It definitely took its toll in ways that are still revealing themselves. But I generally try to keep both eyes open to things and look at the negatives and positives from situations. So I can definitely see both of those sides from the pandemic experience, on a personal level.

Are you somebody who has a history with undergoing therapy in general?
Yeah, actually, I'm in therapy right now—and I wasn't for a few years. But before that, I was attending weekly analysis for four or five years and had shorter sessions before that, too. It's something that I've gone in and out of for longer periods of time. I feel usually called to need to do that more intensive introspection. I love it, it's super important to me.

Yeah, everybody has a different relationship with the introspective aspect of it. I also know sometimes that people have the ability to lose themselves in reflection. It's interesting though, because when I hear people say that, I also get a little worried. I feel like we've made a decent amount of progress in the last 10 years with getting people to go to therapy. I don't necessarily think it's good to go back to the past, either.
That's interesting, I like that perspective. Part of what drew me to therapy throughout my life was wanting to not lose myself in anything and trying to find that awareness—but sometimes your self-awareness can make you blind to other things. The holistic approach is important to me as well. It's not just about going to therapy, and if you're able to be mindful of that, it feels like a good step towards not letting anything be too much of an absolute. My number one mantra in life is "No absolutes."

Talk to me about how this new record came together.
This solo project has functioned as a long-term process in my life. When I make Florist records, I collect my thoughts and life experiences, and then I usually have a pretty big burst of a songwriting session over the course of a couple of months and make a record. It all happens pretty quickly. This solo project has years in between releases as I think about how I want to share a thing and what I want to share. Because the nature of the music is so subtle and so nuanced, I want to pay attention to the space that I'm taking up with it. Something that can be really unobtrusive, but it also asks a lot of the listener beyond being ambient music.

I began thinking about what I was going to do as a live performance for this tour tour in Japan—and I don't tour for the project, because I don't really enjoy playing this kind of music through really large speakers. A lot of what I get out of it gets lost in that environment. I really love listening to my own favorite records of this genre on headphones, or quietly in a room. So for it to be a tour in the first place was really like making an exception for going to a place that I respect so much and was so influential on me. The people involved were Oshi Kunii, who releases records on his own Plancha label, and H. Takahashi, who runs Kankyo Records and makes his own music. He was such a huge inspiration for me when I was first into this world back in 2015, 2016. I had a lot of his tapes.

So I decided to start preparing something, and then this tour was postponed twice due to travel restriction complications. When it came to be last year, it was probably almost two years ago that we started planning it again. So I had the summer of 2024 to prepare. I had some Florist things going on as well, but [the tour] was on my mind. I'd previously prepared two different iterations of this live performance going into it, and I was relearning songs off of Water Memory in different ways—sampling, using guitar. I had so many different versions of what I would bring on this tour, because I wanted ultimate control over what the experience would be since I knew I was going to be worried about sound systems and stuff like that.

I wanted to feel really safe going into it, which relates back to us discussing therapy and like losing yourself in a self-awareness, or being obsessive. I felt like I was getting too obsessed with being so calculated and presentable in a certain way, and I became really uncomfortable with that. This was also during a period of a few years where I was really struggling to manifest whatever a new body of work was going to be with this solo project, I've made records and decided not to release them. I have so much unreleased material from those years. It was a strange internal struggle to find what I wanted my voice to be again. I really did want it to be something that felt meaningful to me, appropriately speaking, of space in the world.

I decided to go back to the beginning, which for me was hearing Music for Airports and learning about the asynchronous looping that Brian Eno did with tape machines, where these loops that are many minutes long phase in and out. I was really interested in when I first started learning about these different ambient pioneers, especially the environmental music philosophy in Japan,
[13:26–13:42] like specifically from Hiroshi Yoshimura and the way that he composed sounds that feel like they're a part of nature. I took those two pillars of what really inspired me before I knew anything about all these little underground niches in the ambient world.

I wanted to do improvisation for the tour, which a lot of ambient artists do. I've
done improvised performance, but difference with this, for me, was that there was nothing automated—nothing that I could trigger to just start making sound in the interim. My setup made no sound unless I played a keyboard. It was this rudimentary way of thinking about melodies, which is pretty much just the feeling of intervals—the emotional feeling that you go to a fifth and then down to a third, or whatever. I don't know those technically, but I know what they feel like, and that's what guides me in improvisation.

I knew that I wanted to bring this sound palette that was simple and cohesive, and that was the extent of the planning. It was after I'd been rehearsing something completely different, which was very locked in and composed. It really was a leap. I felt really strongly that I didn't want to bring something, as a visitor to a place, that was tightly under my control. Something about that felt like it wasn't the right time to do that. I wanted to be more vulnerable and give more of myself to that process and experience, and through that I know I was also very present—or, at least, I was meant to be. That was not a prerequisite for the trip, but it was something I couldn't avoid.

I was also interested in how that was going to vary every night. because for most of my adult life, I've toured so much with Florist, and I do know how variable like your emotions are. Your body, your mind—everything—it's hard to predict how you're going to feel on any given day on tour. So I was excited to go into this with that variable, and I was prepared enough for it. I got to perform the way that I did. I wasn't even planning on turning this into an album, but I brought my recorder because I was looking at what this would be like—and when I started listening to everything, I was like, "I think I want to share this."

You mentioned how often you have toured with Florist over the years. I'm curious to hear you talk about your relationship to touring in general.
Touring is something that doesn't take long to reveal itself to someone. For me, it solidified for me that this is what I want to do in my life. I love touring, and it's the other half of the whole for me for making music, which is so private and cozy. I have that part of me that just loves to be at home, go slowly, be really comfortable, and have this landing pad to feel safe and be able to write music. That's really important. Going on tour—the experience of going out into the world and sharing an experience with people—is maybe more important than than the music itself for me. With Florist, we play shows and everyone arrives with this similar intention to be there, be very introspective, and share that space with each other. It's such a beautiful thing to witness, the trust in the room between everyone, as part of the experience of that project and what live music can be—what gathering people together can be like.

An group emotive session is something that I never imagined would be the reality, but it's where things have ended up with Florist. It gives me so much motivation to keep making music and exploring the channels it creates—channels between people to relate to each other and share experiences without having to say, "I lost this person," or "I was depressed." We don't have to use our own ways of conversational relating to share these experiences. I go out every night after we play and I talk to people, and I I love to do that. I don't ever want to lose that connection, and I hope that it can always remain that way for us. I hope that I'll definitely tour for as long as I'm able to. Like everything, there's a balance. It's hard, and it's definitely exhausting. But the bottom line is that just it's too important for me to not do it for those reasons.

One thing that's taken place in the last couple of years is the proliferation of ambient music. Your solo material, as much as it is ambient, is also a bit of an extension of what you've done with Florist, especially the first couple of records. I'm really curious to hear about your perspective on kind of the evolving practice making ambient music. If you've been making this type of music for a while, you might find yourself surrounded by what I would uncharitably call disingenuous um attempts at working in this vein.
Yeah, it's definitely been a part of my headspace for the last few years. On one hand, I've found so many amazing records and artists, and 90% of all the music I listen to is instrumental music that's ambient leaning or downtempo. The last few years have been interesting to witness. There's been a lot of good, and also things that I don't love to see. Anything getting hyper-commodified or used for selling products sort of bums me out.

I did a handful of demos on YouTube for different synths and effects that stood out in gear. I distanced myself from that world because I'm not really comfortable with someone spending money because of something I use. I've gotten to a neutral place with that, where I can talk about gear that I use—but being directly involved with promotion, I didn't like that. So I wanted to take some space from it.

What I said before about being really intentional about what I do—that had a lot to do with that headspace of observing how much ambient music was coming into the world and the focus was on that. It was very cool in certain ways, and there's so many people that I know who have labels and are also releasing music. There's so many of us who have been doing it for a long time and truly love it. But it's scary when you start to see, at worst, AI music that's derivative of this pentatonic genre of pleasant ambient music. But having it be something that's more connected to my music practice as a whole has brought me back to wrestling with that less.

Florist, the solo project, they really are all connected and part of the same universe. The process for me, over the years, has been tapping on the ice to see how I want to communicate something. But it's a bit strange, maybe.nIt breaks all the rules of structure and form. But I keep wanting to try and see how far I can go with my own practice. The experimental threads in Florist are subtle sometimes, but they're really central to the whole project, my relationship to music, and my lifestyle is very anti-nonconforming in so many ways. I don't want to be a part of something that feels like it's canned or assimilated, because that's not what music is for me. Making music, for me, is for finding an answer to like the life that I hated
being in. I've gotten more confident in the last couple of years in doing my thing, being myself, and trusting that feeling that I've always trusted.

You mentioned doing the YouTube tutorials and having a sense of wariness about gear fetishism, the latter of which seems like it typically comes from a place that is, artistically, a bit misguided.
I mean, we live in a violently capitalist world. I'm just more interested, for myself, in the intangible aspects of music. It's really hard to get distracted from that. I shop online and buy gear all the time, but when it actually comes down to it, I know that I need to be not thinking about that stuff at all, which is usually a part of that feeling of the decision when something is feeling right. The last thing on my mind is what I'm using to make with it—which is kind of the goal, really.

I'm curious to hear you talk about navigating the financial aspects of being a working musician. You had a brief bit of Florist's music included in the Beyoncé documentary, which is one of those things that used to occur a lot more in the late 2010s as a potential moment of greater exposure for an artist in general. I'm not seeing that happen quite as often anymore—or, at least, not as much as people working in scoring or ads, which seems like one of the only ways to make a decent living in music now.
When you make this choice to have the art life, to use the Lynchian term, the decision for me has influenced every step of the way—from being a teenager and choosing to not go to college, to moving where people were playing music, and then moving to New York City to start Florist and play DIY shows, booking our own tours—then, a couple years later, getting a booking agent, releasing our first vinyl with a label that just started. Every single step of the way, I've truly just stood wherever I am and been like, "This is exactly what I want to be doing. Whatever it is right now is all I want because I'm doing it."

Money, you know, it comes and goes. Sometimes there are good years, sometimes there are hard years. I work other jobs, sometimes when we're in between touring. The last five years have been off the coattails of that end of the 2010s, where Florist was really fortunate to have a lot of payoff from grinding it out, being dedicated, and not stopping. There's a lot to be said about that—wherever you are, wherever you can fit it into your life, just do that. For me, it's not one option—this is just it for me. I'm not making the choice to do it, I'm making the choice to be like, "How does it happen?"

We have five Florist albums, I have four instrumental albums, and we've gotten really lucky with syncs, like you're saying. There were some moments at the end of 2018 and 2019 where Florist did grow to a point where, knock on wood, my goal right now is to achieve longevity as an artist. Not stopping, just continuing to make work, continuing to like try and have opportunities to tour, even though our last couple of tours haven't gotten bigger. We're not climbing up this ladder. We might stay where we are forever—but we can maintain that, make new music, and just keep going and doing whatever we can.

I am super interested in scoring opportunities. I did a film score in 2022, which was my job for that entire year, and the film actually ended up not coming out. I still got paid for it, and it might come out eventually. It's a film about a pandemic, and when it was finished, they were kind of like, "I don't think that this is the right time to release this right now." But that's a job. I'm getting syncs, going on tour. I have a publisher who's amazingly helpful. It's just tons of little pies to just like have all your fingers in, and it's been a long time coming. It's finally started to feel like there might be some kind of stability. It's still not a lot of money, but it is enough—and I would love to not be any more known than I already am. "Going wide" is how I've been thinking of it, just being a working-class musician. I just really believe in it, and I love doing this.