Heathered Pearls

The ambient project Heathered Pearls was the brainchild of Polish-born Brooklynite Jakub Alexander, who had a career deeply rooted in music before he ever released any of his own. He was music "curator" for Tycho's ISO50 blog, Tycho's manager, a DJ under the Aarnio moniker, and, latterly, head of A&R at Ghostly International, the label that released his music. Introduced as a young man to ambient music by his mother, he loved the sound but hated the "Pure Moods" clichés often associated with it, and strove to create his own vision of the genre that avoided these. In 2004, while residing in Ann Arbor, Michigan, he founded the eclectic electronica netlabel Moodgadget alongside his friend Adam E. Hunt, with the aim of "exposing the diversity in electronically made music." Many of the label's alumni later went on to release albums on Ghostly.

After years of daily DJ mix podcasts on ISO50 as Aarnio, in 2011 his own music was released for the first time, as a now-hard-to-find EP compilation, Polite Isle, was issued under his real name through the digital subscription-only Ghostly Music Service; then, in December 2012, the Ghostly label proper put out his debut album as Heathered Pearls, Loyal. Created to help him deal with his own anxiety and heavily inspired by his favorite experience — sitting by the ocean at night — the hypnotic, soothing, melodic, loop-based ambient record dropped on vinyl and digital only. ~ John D. Buchanan, Rovi