Welsh musician Aisha Vaughan announces her new mini-album Water World, a blissful rendition of Celtic New Age music conceived and created with utmost sincerity and sensitivity from Vaughan’s converted barn deep amidst the mountains of Wales’ countryside.

“Our planet and everything in it including ourselves is special and sacred. I think we forget that sometimes. Water World is a reflection on our precious planet earth… or the words of Carl Sagan… our pale blue dot.”

Following 2025’s reissue of Vaughan’s debut album The Gate, her newest work Water World continues on a serene path of natural recordings, ethereal voice, harp, and aquatic synthesis made magical by its place in Vaughan’s otherwise natural world. The cover art and accompanying imagery for Water World shows Vaughan in total symbiosis with her art: a white flowing gown, a placid lake, and soft focus photography.

New Age music from the Celtic/British Isles crossed over into the mainstream in the late 80s - notably with Enya (and her band Clannad), the perhaps now lesser-known instrumental Celtic harp music of Patrick Ball, and the slew of now mostly forgotten various artist compilations that saturated the New Age CD and cassette music market in the early 90s.

While Aisha Vaughan’s work continues this earnest tradition, full of references to the Celtic pioneers, the lens of contemporary ambient music through which this influence on her music passes leaves a graceful, refined sparkle. The single “The Water” marries dulcet arpeggiation with Vaughan’s worldworldly voice as real and organic recordings appear both in their own form and in synthesised representation, bringing us into a world of natural and glistening wonder. “I’ve always been fascinated with water,” Vaughan writes. “Generally, visually, audibly and chemically. We only exist because of water (among other things), and when I sit and watch a body or water, I think about how fundamental it is to life itself.”

Later, “Dark Forest” is moodier, opening with pitchshifted wind chimes and reverberate eagle cry, as Vaughan invokes ancient peace with wordless song. Like the mountainscapes that inspire Vaughan’s songwriting, the piece has peaks and valleys, rising into celestial blue at its highest points and dropping to near silence between. It was, fittingly, the only track made at night, recorded in part in a wetland area near Vaughan’s residence: “there were so many frogs and crickets jumping around. The swamp was kind of silvery in the moonlight.”

Living in a converted barn in mid-Wales, Vaughan writes and records her music to red kites and eagles hunting in the mountains outside her windows. The notably welcomed layers of ASMR sound design and computer music production supplement the main instrument here - her voice - woven within campfire crackle, wind chime, cricket, bird, harp, flute, synthesizer pad & sfx, and new moon wolf howl to channel celestial guides conjured from her remote homeland.

Using composition as catharsis stemming from a traumatic upbringing where music was banned in her childhood household, and the inherent occult history that surrounds the art form, Vaughan does not shy away from precisely stewarding this particular - often still-overlooked - musical tradition through her generation’s ambient lens.

Composed and Performed by Aisha Vaughan

Mastered by Matthewdavid ‘MD’ McQueen