The cover of I Was All You Are says it all: blinding sunshine, dried weeds, a woman walking alone.  Alicia Merz (Birds of Passage) seems to have been raised in haziness, forever existing just a bit out of focus.  When she sings of “sunny garden places”, it’s easy to picture her lying in a meadow, catching the clouds between her fingertips.  On I Was All You Are, she also sings of water; the elements are beginning to coalesce.

I’ve Lost is a downbeat name for a recording artist, bearing poetic associations: it’s not you I’ve lost, but the world.  The art of losing isn’t hard to master.  The ambient settings of I’ve Lost are slow beyond slow; there’s no way to measure them, but 4 b.p.m. seems a reasonable estimate.  Listening is like watching a film in slow motion, then filming it and watching that film in…