The season is Winter, the time of day is dawn or dusk, the mood is sombre and reflective.
Ian Humberstone's fourth album is influenced by, and dedicated to, the Norwegian region near to the Øvsthusfossen waterfall where he spent time working as a farmland.
The eight minute track named after this impressive landmark drifts along in an unhurried manner as he admires "A pattern cut into the hill, without reason or will".
As a title like Thou Dusky Spirit Of The Wood suggests, the songs express a devotional relationship with the landscape as Humberstone explores the winding pathways, misty mountains and dramatic waterways.
Let Us Go, he sings, "where no-one can find us and none may follow", but this doesn't sound like an entreaty from someone looking forward to a group excursion.
Rather, the singer is so immersed in his solitary reflections that the album is more like a musical homage to Henry David Thoreau's Walden. As with Thoreau, he does not seem to seek, nor need, human companionship, but wishes only to know and communicate the experience of living in harmony with nature.
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The need to be at one with his surrounding is best exemplified in I Am Like A Lake an old song from 2006 that appeared on his first album and is revisited here like an old friend. Tom Western's drumming and Malcolm Benzie's violin take the tune in different directions and it sounds warmer and richer than the original as Humberstone intones "I felt breathless and real and alive".
The hymns to silence and simplicity are rendered with steadfastly analogue instrumentation while utilizing recording methods which include the use on an old real-to-reel machine.
With a baritone voice reminiscent of Bill Callaghan or Stuart A.Staples of Tindersticks, it's hard not to feel a sense of melancholy in this collection but there is a reassuring strength and beauty too in these lilting odes to solitude.
Tissø Lake's website
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