Audiopile Review: NYC-based composer Lori Saxl hits close to home on her new mini-album, acting as a companion piece to her Earth Focus LP issued just last year. The EP, simply titled Texada, was created for an NFB documentary that examines the manmade and natural changes of the evolving limestone landscape of the remote Gulf Island. While Earth Focus was largely a synthesizer-based score, drawing on inspiration from Philip Glass’ busy minimalism, lush Japanese Environmental Music and quirky Radiophonic bubblers, Texada extends on these themes further, meshing all the above into a beguiling and mesmerizing treatment of watery loops, sampled sax repetitions and slow pluming synths. With erosion and the unstoppable movement of time as the weighty backdrop, it might seem like this would be intensive listening, but that couldn’t be further from truth. It’s a naturalistic endeavor here, Saxl painting us a picture of the Earth’s inevitable reconfiguration, but the results are totally life-affirming. Despite its brevity, this is her best work yet.

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New York-based composer Elori Saxl’s score Texada will be released via Western Vinyl on April 25th. Texada is the official soundtrack for the film of the same title directed by Claire Sanford and Josephine Anderson and produced by the National Film Board of Canada.

Set on the remote Canadian island of Texada, the film explores the evolving relationship between people and place. Through a richly textured sonic environment, Saxl extends the film’s themes into sound, capturing cycles of creation, extraction, and renewal that unfold across vastly different timescales.

Texada Island, off the coast of British Columbia, is a terrain shaped by deep time and shifting histories. Its ancient limestone formations, among the oldest in North America, bear witness to millennia of tectonic activity, erosion, and industry. Mined for use in everyday materials, these rocks form a vital link between the island and the wider world. The film considers the tension between permanence and impermanence, where industrial sites—once centers of destruction—have been reclaimed by nature, with green growth emerging from the ruins.

Saxl, whose work frequently investigates the interplay of memory, environment, and technology, translates these ideas into sound. Blending analog synthesizers, processed baritone saxophone (performed by Henry Solomon), and field recordings of water and rock, she builds layers of sound that evoke the textures of stone, the movement of waves, and the pulse of industry. The saxophone—fragmented, stretched, and digitally transformed—oscillates between organic and synthetic, a spectral presence threading through the compositions. Yet, in moments where breath and subtle imperfections emerge, the instrument becomes distinctly human, grounding the music in physicality and fragility. As pulsing rhythms and evolving harmonic textures suggest the steady forces that have shaped Texada over millennia, intricate details reflect the rhythms of daily life and labor.

Throughout the score, Saxl plays with scale, layering fleeting human moments against the vast, slow-moving forces of geological transformation. The soundtrack moves through stages of formation, excavation, and reflection, with pieces like “The Quarry” channeling the relentless drive of resource extraction through propulsive textures, while “It Will Be Gone” expands outward, capturing the inevitability and awe of geologic change. In contrast, “The Most Special Place” shifts to a more intimate register, evoking nostalgia and discovery—moments when the enormity of time becomes tangible, like the simple act of holding a stone and wondering where it came from.

By intertwining the human and the elemental, Saxl’s score not only deepens the immersive quality of Texada but also stands as its own meditation on transformation and coexistence. Her compositions invite the listener to consider how personal and planetary histories intertwine, leaving traces across landscapes both external and internal.