The Quiet Burrow is a new family project where I hand over to my daughter Isla (aged 6) to present a short radio show of Ambient tracks. These shows will hopefully be shared on a quarterly basis on my Mixcloud account and Isla will talk you through her selections as well as chat about art, nature and whatever comes to mind.

Isla has been very interested in what I'm doing with Whitelabrecs and we listen to music together a lot. Often she'll ask me what I'm up to on the label and I'll show her the artwork, the music and oddly she's even intrigued by some of the administrative work that goes into it all! She recently asked me if she could help me do some things to run the label, so we had the idea of creating a radio show.

It took a while to work out how we'd approach it and we're pleased to share this first episode of Quiet Burrow with you. The header image is a photo of Isla playing the piano whilst on holiday in Cornwall, back in 2020 - it always makes us smile. The cover image for Quiet Burrow 001 comes courtesy of Bob Burnett, after we asked the Inner Echo community for photos of bunnies... thanks Bob!

Hit the play button below and if you like what you hear there's a tracklist below, followed by some information about how and why we created Quiet Burrow as well as a brief history of Isla's interest in music...

QUIET BURROW 001: TRACKLIST

1. blochemy - ale
2. blochemy - eim
3. blochemy - trai
4. Logic Moon - Under The Blue
5. James Murray - Mallow

ABOUT QUIET BURROW

Harry: What is Quiet Burrow?

Isla: It's a radio show about Ambient music and I also like to chat about the songs, art and nature and I might use the show to do a few different creative things.

Harry: Why is it called Quiet Burrow?

Isla: Bunnies are my favourite animals and they live in burrows. Ambient music is quiet and so this is why we called it the Quiet Burrow.

Harry: How did we make Quiet Burrow?

Isla: Daddy bought me an orange tape machine and a pink tape. When Daddy played me a song in the car that I liked I told him and we added it to a list. We recorded these songs from the CD onto the tape.

You can find out more about these portable, bluetooth cassette players via the We Are Rewind website and they're also stocked by various HiFi shops across the world.

ISLA'S EARLY ADVENTURES WITH AMBIENT MUSIC

The Owl Speaker

Isla was born in 2018 and whilst my wife and I were expecting, we got the nursery decorated (I had a go at wallpapering which was, well, a challenge let's say) and I also discovered a range of little bluetooth speakers called the 'Soundbub' which you can see here. I simply had to get one of these so that I could play Ambient music and I guess this was the starting point for working on a collaborative album with Sven Laux, who also became a father later that year. That album 'Until We Fall' is really dear to Sven and I and it was released on the Fluid Audio label the following year. I remember listening to it as I returned from hospital the day after Isla was born, to collect some things for my wife. It's an emotional reminder of simple, calm times and I play it to Isla sometimes. There's a lovely story linking with Sven and his daughter, which we'll always talk about when we pick up this album from time to time. Despite buying this speaker, we didn't actually use it that much when she was a young baby, as she always slept so well!

Sleep Music

Here you can see Isla sleeping next to a copy of Sleeplaboratory1.0 which is a series I launched in 2019. I guess with a baby in the house I began to think of Ambient music's relationship with sleep a lot more! I made this post for Instagram some years later and got Isla to hold a copy of Sleeplaboratory4.0 to mark the passing of time since that first edition. When she was a toddler she asked me about the owl speaker and so we got it charged up again and I started to gather some sleepy tracks into a playlist. I'd look out for Whitelabrecs artists who uploaded their work to Spotify, play these to Isla and we nicknamed the playlist 'Calm Cloud'.

The Yoto Player

As she's got older and after a few more years being exposed to my music taste on school runs, Isla's become quite the fan of Ambient music. She no longer uses the Owl speaker though, after we decided to buy her this small device called a Yoto player (parents, click HERE to check it out). One of its features is a daily children's podcast which is presented by a chap called Jake. This covers educational topics, jokes, artistic draw-a-longs, five fabulous facts and loads more. Isla loves it and never misses an episode. You can also insert cards into the player, which you can buy from the Yoto shop. These consist of stories by renowned children's authors, maths lessons and fact cards - Isla has built up a nice collection. But what's really cool, is you can also make our own cards! So Isla selected 14 favourite tracks from our 'Calm Cloud' playlist and she listens to this every night without fail, after she has listened to Jake's latest Yoto Daily of course.

Isla will be back in June with her next episode of Quiet Burrow, so stay tuned! We've already started piecing together our plans...