Author of the Twilight
Beautiful guitar playing and gorgeous synthesiser accompaniment? Complimentary spoken word samples and awe-inspiring field recordings…sound too much to ask? Not for Time Released Sound, who after a wonderful 2012 release from Fescal and several other installments, put out this, a highly limited package from The Angling Loser, all about investigating the nature between casting off and the natural world.
There are several delicious moments to savour here. Take the intro to “Morning”, where birdsong, nurturing bass notes and drifting, omnipresent synth sit on the side of the boat, gently rocking your attention back and forth from idyllic sightseeing to a play with your evolutionary intentions. The closest artists of resemblance are Brian Eno, Loscil, Good Weather For An Airstrike, Spheruleus and Natural Snow Buildings. Nonetheless, The Angling Loser manages to transcend through introspection on the deep nuances of his production.
Samples of water, as would be expected with this type of theme, add a soothing New Age presence to the music, but this is no saccharine-pretty exercise in pseudo-meditation. The sounds are full of depth, the timbres of guitar rich, the tones of synth connecting to the ear like a collared dove’s elegance. If the first disc wasn’t enough, too, there is a disc of remixes, one coming from the very promising artist Porya Hatami.
“I’ve spent hundreds of hours staring at a float (…) To bring up a lovely solid theme, like living metal, from a world where nothing exists, but those inevitable facts, which raise life out of nothing, and return it to nothing (…) Nice isn’t it?”
Time Released Sound say: “this release is available in two versions. This first deluxe version, in an edition of just 100 copies, comes in a 5.5″ square, hand stamped watery green translucent envelope. In each envelope is a 15-20 page, hand sewn fly tying flip book, antique fishing photos and/or postcards, a page from an antique anglers journal (some pages hand inscribed), and a two sided hand printed insert. Each envelope is strung and tagged with a hand stamped, vintage, fishing cigarette card. Each of these also comes with an originally packaged, vintage fishing lure.”
Time to go load up the reel.