Sometimes it can feel like this digital age is glutting us with anything and everything from the past being available all at once. But then a gem like this will be unearthed, and all the noise falls away, and you realise how privileged we are to live in a time of such archival. This was originally released in 1985 as a companion cassette with early editions of the great author Le Guin’s Always Coming Home: a sprawling but rigorous ethnography of a far-future, low-tech society in Northern California. For it she created an entire language and alphabet as well as traditions and myths — and with the analogue synth explorer Todd Barton, she helped translate this into startlingly convincing songs. Combined with field recordings of nature, these gentle, considered ritual songs have the extremely potent effect of transporting you to a different Earth, dislodging you from aesthetic preconceptions and placing you entirely in their small, simple but very strange world. Lovingly repackaged on LP with liner notes in 2018, this is an unearthed treasure from a past future — or is it a future past?