Onde de Bouche - Grow Easy Love Onde de Bouche

Grow Easy Love is the debut release from Onde De Bouche, the solo project of artist and musician, Victoria Morton. It coincides with an exhibition of her paintings at The Modern Institute as part of Glasgow International.

The music we make is not always understandable, it tumbles out, its own life force. Maybe there are structures but it’s what happens outside the structures that make it unique. We’re really loving this record which is in the best tradition of British experimental pop music - Basil Kirchin, Robert Wyatt, Virginia Astley, Deux Filles. 

Recorded between Italy and Scotland, it somehow brings together everything she’s done up this point - personal soundworks, collaborations, early music youth groups, her participation in bands like Suckle, Muscles Of Joy, Sound Of Yell, Rev Magnetic, Amor, Sotto Voce… It’s like her painting work - extraordinary, imaginative, technical. The relationship between painting and music is key. VM is known for her experimental and expansive approach to painting and has exhibited internationally. Onde de Bouche and Grow Easy Love are the result of many years of developing a personal approach to music making and instrumentation.

Recorders and synthesisers are present as well as hand held percussion. Trumpet is sporadic and various, at times functioning like a voice. VM’s love of analogue synthesisers bristles throughout. Snaking and bubbling passages from her Doepfer modular synth are orchestrated across many tracks as are pulsating Formanta patterns. (The Formanta is a unique 1970’s Russian analogue, polyphonic and monophonic synthesiser in one). The versatile polyphonic Crumar Stratus (made in Italy) provides strings, crunchy bass and organ sounds. Piano is central for Onde de Bouche and it often forms the backbone of the tracks.

The variety of styles and instrumentation on the 13 tracks on Grow Easy Love propose a range of emotional registers and builds a sound world with it’s own non-linear logic, from Velvets-style bittersweet storytelling to spaced out disco, feminist punk, and from detailed soaring instrumentals to industrial field recording. Grow Easy Love employs the structure of a soundtrack compilation and the feeling is of a life being lived out through music in all its absurd complexity and pleasure. Contributors include Janis Murray, Stevie Jones, Luke Sutherland, Luke Fowler and Merlin James.

Onde De Bouche is without time - in its own place, an interior, exterior world of its own making. It moves easily from moment to moment  - sweet singing, piano, synth blip, strings, musique concrète sounds, pop music. It’s a record to play over and over and maybe never know.

One of the best records I’ve heard in 2026.

SP / Monorail Music