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Bandcamp: https://losttribesound.bandcamp.com/album/fearful-void-series

"Built Upon A Fearful Void" or "Fearful Void Series" for short, is Lost Tribe Sound's latest subscription series. The series will introduce 15 new full-length albums to the roster between June 2020 through June 2021.  The line-up includes new full-length album by From the Mouth of the Sun, William Ryan Fritch, Vieo Abiungo, Yadayn, Microwolf, Several Wives, Arrowounds, and debut albums from Claire Deak & Tony Dupé (aka Saddleback), Mt Went (aka Seabuckthorn & Dave Anderson), Gallowglas, and Sailcloth.

Built Upon A Fearful Void Series

Listen / Purchase: https://lnk.to/oldcapital

The Old Capital (out on Lost Tribe Sound) is the debut album from Melbourne composers Claire Deak and Tony Dupé. The album is their first recorded collaboration, though Dupé has released two solo albums under the name Saddleback. 

The duo describes themselves as a home orchestra well-suited for late night rambling. Much like traveling in the dark of night, the sound explorations found throughout The Old Capital come into view seemingly out of nowhere. Headstrong rhythms of shuffling organic debris and lumbering stomps help light the path with some brief success, only to be swallowed up by a slow moving fog of droning organs and dampened strings. However with the proper guides, finding ones footing in this shadowy landscape doesn't have to be difficult. Claire and Tony echo this sentiment throughout with a fine balance of both playful and haunting passages. Their confidence reassures us that once our eyes adjust to the dark, it need not be a frightening place. 

A wide variety of acoustic instrumentation weave their way into the music, including: pianos, accordion, harp, harpsichord, pump organs, pipe organ, recorder, flute, trumpet, euphonium, clarinets, stroh violin, viola, wulf fidel, cello, double bass, guitar, charango, mandolin, baritone ukulele, banjo, xylophone, glockenspiel, gamelan, drums and voices. 

Lost Tribe Sound feels incredibly lucky to have stumbled upon the duo's music because of a kind tip from the good folks at the Preserved Sound label. It makes perfect sense that Claire and Tony hail from Australia. This location has turned out many our favorite electroacoustic acts, known for cobbling genres together in ways that leave just enough of the roughhewn framework showing. Comparatively speaking, Brambles, Part Timer, and Thomas William Hill (aka Origamibiro) come to mind.

The Old Capital

From a Rooftop

Claire Deak & Tony Dupé - From a Rooftop (from The Old Capital)

Listen / Purchase: https://lnk.to/mycears

‘My Cauliflower Ears’ is the third album from Netherlands-born, Benjamin van Vliet, who makes music under the name, Microwolf.  

‘My Cauliflower Ears’ combines the sonically rich, yet minimal approach of drone music, the sampling techniques of hip hop, and the intimacy of folk-styled songwriting and storytelling. It’s the kind of honest, personal, and roughhewn sort of sound that has inspired Lost Tribe Sound since our beginning in 2010. This type of hard-to-frame vocal music has always been important to us, and helped us convert some of the most diehard instrumental music fans, into fans of vocal-lead music such as this. Music where the vocal truly plays the role of an instrument, just as much as anything else in the song. Microwolf is very much in line with other acts that we’ve championed over the years, such as Mute Forest, Cock & Swan and Graveyard Tapes.

Before Van Vliet started Microwolf, he’d always made music that was a compromise. Making music with others he’d naturally strive for democracy. So the outcome would always be a mix of ideas, wherein his more outlandish ideas would usually get tossed in the process. Microwolf was designed to be an outlet for those things Van Vliet knew he’d have to do himself to get them right.

Having never fully taken the creative reins before, the first two Microwolf albums ('You Better Go Now' and the mini-album 'You Are The Everything') were a huge learning curve. 'You Better Go Now' is sonically all over the place and absolutely stuffed with ideas. That album could have been the beginning and the end of Microwolf, but about two years later Van Vliet realized he had at least one more solo album in him. After taking a refugee vow with a Buddhist lama in 2018 and diving deeper into drone music and contemporary classical music, Van Vliet set out to make a statement that was far more subtle and better articulated. An album that was short, quiet, conceptually precise, but executed loosely and freely. No tight rhythms, no strummed guitars, no loud singing. Music that embraces its own emptiness, awkwardness and fleetingness.

My Cauliflower Ears

Mara

Microwolf - Mara (from My Cauliflower Ears)

Listen / Purchase: https://lnk.to/elders

Elders is the fifth album from London-based guitarist Gowaart Van Den Bossche, working under the moniker yadayn. The record also serves as yadayn’s first release for Lost Tribe Sound.

Elders translates to "elsewhere" in Dutch. As that title suggests, this album is a meditation on groundedness and the possibilities of other lives in other places. Recorded after having moved from Belgium to London, Elders is a meditation on the experiences yadayn had and the personal relationships he built during, in between, and after three trips to Iran, especially its provinces of East and West Azerbaijan between 2016 and 2018. While these trips ended up resulting in a personal failure, this album is one effort to make sense of the events in the form of a highly personal engagement with Iranian musical and literary traditions.

While many of yadayn’s previous albums have mainly consisted of solo guitar recordings, Elders marks a small but important shift in approach. A pronounced use of overdubs can be heard throughout the album, along with meaningful selections of field recordings from his time in Iran, Persian poetry written by one of many random acquaintances made while traveling in Iran, and loose interpretations of traditional songs. All have embedded their charms and taken on new meaning for Van Den Bossche.

It feels right to leave many of the personal experiences behind Elders untold, at least in a written language. In its place, yadayn’s musical transcription has provided something much more powerful. Sorrow, anger, joy, and calm all make time for each other during the course of the album. Its emotions are worn on the sleeve, weary yet wiser, and ultimately grateful for the experience.

Elders

Verder

Yadayn - Verder (from Elders)

Listen / Purchase: https://lnk.to/deepseadiver

‘The Loneliness of the Deep Sea Diver’ is the second release in Lost Tribe Sound’s Fearful Void Series. The album arrives courtesy of Arrowounds, the experimental electronic project of Ryan S Chamberlain.

What began for Chamberlain as a simple concept of exploring his sound within the expanse of aquatic lore, quickly evolved into a storyline regarding an unnamed nautical exploration attempt that tragically unravels. Ultimately, this results in the title character being trapped below the surface by an event. Struggling with fear, paranoia and hallucinations brought on by sensory deprivation & oxygen levels, the diver fights to make sense of what is real and what is imagined in the depths.

The themes of ‘The Loneliness…’ became sort of an analogy of Chamberlain’s feelings in his role as a caregiver to someone close to him suffering through cancer treatments, the confusion and loss of power and understanding in the midst of such a trying experience. Struggling for clarity in the quieter moments and using sound to maintain a semblance of balance and buoyancy in life, these recording sessions provided clarity for Chamberlain. The music allowed him to communicate emotions he was unable to fully comprehend or verbalize.

It began with what Chamberlain calls "tape loop therapy.” He started to spend time layering loops and sounds, rhythm and decay. It became a sort of meditation process of strictly being in the moment and not worrying about an end result. Only after a few weeks did patterns begin to take shape and songs begin to emerge. Small glimmers in a sea of obscured sound. A pair of dual works were extracted, each exploring different facets of this unique and trying time. ‘The Loneliness of the Deep Sea Diver’ represents the insular or hermetic portion of these sessions, while ‘The Oncotype Sketchbook’ (out now on Pyramid Blood Recordings) incorporates more of the hospital field recordings and an overall narration of the entire cancer survivor experience.

The Loneliness of the Deep Sea Diver

Sunken Phantoms (Single Version)

Arrowounds - Sunken Phantoms (Single Version)(from The Loneliness of the Deep Sea Diver)

Listen / Purchase: https://lnk.to/theletdown

‘The Letdown’ is a record better identified by the vibe it creates rather than a particular genre or style. It’s dirty, unapologetically loud and charmingly haphazard. It’s the sort of self-educated, non-jazz record that critics of Moondog would have written off as impure. Frankly, we’re good with that. The strength of the record lies not with any collegiate-level classification, but in its ability conjure moods that just feel good, are instantly familiar and invite a certain nostalgia. The gritty, noir side of it, brings to mind the old black and white detective stories. The jovial, 1920’s romanticism, lends a bit of class and gives the sense that even though everything is falling to shit, we are going to power through it with a bit of song and dance.

Whatever one happens to take away from this album, ‘The Letdown’ is meant to be fun, help the whisky burn just a bit less, and keep the blood flowing. Read into it too much and you might spoil it. Guaranteed it is unlike any Fritch record to date.

The Letdown

Unhinged

William Ryan Fritch - Unhinged (from The Letdown)

Purchase / Stream: https://lnk.to/gallowglas

Lost Tribe Sound presents the debut album from Gallowglas, titled, ‘I Dream I See You Hit The Water, I Dream I See You Change Your Mind’ (or for short, IDISYHTW, IDISYCYM). From the start, Gallowglas has been a captivating study in duality… a push and pull of opposing forces, techniques, voices, and philosophies battling it out to create something quite profound, an album that felt close to never coming together at all.

Ultimately strong wills prevailed, working through disagreements, lost sessions, and stretches of post-world stopping malaise with an undeniable knowing that the results of this struggle were becoming a body of work that felt worth fighting for. Hardly a shiny sales pitch, but if you’re looking for another glossed up one sheet about an alt rock band who just found that perfect sound and rode it... Gallowglas is not that band.

That said, ‘IDISYHTW, IDISYCYM’ is an album with some fire in it. It’s a smoldering, crawling sort of indie that will most likely be treated like an outcast in the genre… a grandiose, experimental and bruised sort of classical that won’t be sweet enough or keep its mouth shut long enough for the neoclassical types. It’s a crude, ballad-heavy breed of outsider music that just speaks to us.

Galloglas feels wounded, at times almost beyond repair, but in a relatable way. A pain or sadness that you live with, internalize, live through, learn from. There is quiet strength to ‘IDISYHTW, IDISYCYM’ that it maintains throughout. Some moments bring tears when least expected, and some flood the heart with an anxious sort of excitement. It moves like a sharp blade through fog, cutting from seemingly out of nowhere with a deceivingly effortless amount of force. Gallowglas pairs stark, affecting vocals, derelict piano melodies, and a succinct array of ghostly background mechanics.

I dream I see you hit the water, I dream I see you change your mind

There is nothing flawless

Gallowglas - There Is Nothing Flawless (from IDISYHTW, IDISYCYM)

Lost Tribe Sound is a record label that specializes in organic and exploratory sound. Lost Tribe Sound admires music that leaves its tattered edges proudly in place, acoustic instrumentation blended seamlessly with dirty mechanics, timeworn sound worlds rooted in the muck and the mire of the present. The sound generally falls along the lines of bizarrely rhythmic, beautifully decayed electro-acoustic music, often with a reverence for low-end. LTS focuses on full-length albums, with a strong commitment to well-made packaging. The aim is to unearth timeless music that pushes the envelope of modern composition while paying homage to the ancient.