Julie Gladstone’s Life Line invites listeners on a healing journey through original ambient soundscapes and ancient Sephardic lullabies. Life Line is an invitation to rest, dream and to connect with the life blood of the earth through the sound of flowing creeks and rivers.

These songs are inspired by anecdotes about her great grandmother Julie Bejarano, who would sing ancient Judeo-Spanish folk songs while she knit and embroidered on her balcony wherever she found herself in the diaspora. Gladstone has adapted and re-interpreted Durmé Durmé and Nani Nani, two Ladino lullabies for a contemporary electro-ambient sound.

It is said that mothers would sing these songs to soothe their babies on the walk into exile after they were expelled from their homeland.

The songs on this album contain live field recordings at the meeting place of Lake Ontario and Etobicoke Creek, the site of the signing of the Toronto Purchase Agreement in 1805; as well as along the Rio Cuerpo del Hombre River in Béjar, Spain, the medieval village from which Gladstone’s own ancestors were exiled in 1492.
This music is an acknowledgement of the impact of the Spanish Inquisition and the Doctrine of Discovery. An acknowledgment of the colonization of the America’s and the destruction of Indigenous culture. The singing of these ancestral songs on the traditional territories of the Anishnabee, the Haudensaunee, the Mississaugas, Huron Wendat and the Chippewa seeks to initiate conversations and healing relationships between Gladstone’s own ancestors who lived in the Diaspora with the ancestors of the land of T’karanto where she finds herself raising her daughter.

Julie Gladstone is an interdisciplinary artist based in Toronto Canada. This EP accompanies the book and exhibition entitled Four Corners, Four Angels, Ten Stones, Ten Veils produced as an MFA thesis through OCAD University in 2022 and was recorded during the COVID 19 pandemic while her daughter was napping.