Tara Clerkin - In Spring - VINYL LP

Tara Clerkin Trio return to World of Echo with a 5-song collection of quixotic, emotional redolence. If their musical output has been a little sparse during those in-between years, limited to a few solo ventures and an astonishing ten minute long piece as a trio, their time has otherwise been richly spent continuous writing and recording, live performances, a cultivation of local and more far-flung artistic connections, and a monthly NTS show that, through the voice of others, speaks to their own unorthodox interests. It's the conflux of that winding activity that leads indirectly to On The Turning Ground, 26 minutes of probing, thoughtful composition that draws from no one specific source. Their inspirations might be centreless, but the trio still possess a very obvious anchor in the form of their hometown, Bristol a city of multitudes, heterogenous and vibrant in such a way as to allow it to renew and remake time and again. Tara Clerkin Trio drink from that same well, duly reflecting a rich musical heritage built on fwd-facing electronic subcultures and experimental urges. The two instrumental pieces that bookend the EP display an increasing mastery of compositional space 'Brigstow' and 'Once Around' both emanate an interstitial quality that's not so much after- as in-between-hours, miniature dub-folk symphonies held together by the kind of tacit understanding that remains the preserve of only the closest of family units. If those two tracks are shaped by a sense of shifting temporality, then the three vocal-led pieces that comprise the record's core feel like a gentle ossifying of aesthetic into their own unique form of avant-pop undeniable re-directions of that late 90s impulse to bend pop sensibilities into off-centre terrain, to render the familiar new again.1. Brigstow 2. World in Delay 3. Marble Walls 4. The Turning Ground 5. Once Around

With two extraordinary mini-albums making a splash on London's World of Echo tag in wake of their self-titled 2020 debut, Somewhere Good is, in many ways, the Tara Clerkin Trio's most realised work. In running their usual gauntlet of idiosyncratic approaches, Clerkin & co. Color in and outside of compositional lines over the course of 40+ celebratory minutes - never wallowing, despite inherently somber subject matters of self-defeat, disease, displacement, restlessness, gentrification - allowing their arrangements and improvisations ample space and time to situate, stretch out, breathe, cross-pollinate, and ultimately take deeper hold on the listener's imagination - all while somehow sounding more like themselves than ever before.Of course, there are traceable influences herein.. Being the big dumb American from the small boring town that I am, cornfed on '90s alternative radio with the enchantingly exotic sounds of Maxinquaye and Mezzanine emanating from my chunky tube television, I can't help but to make a blatantly obvious reference to a InchBristol soundInch, ie the whole trip-hop trip, the pastoral crooning over the suggestive urban grime of cracked electro/piano treatments, the digitally-yet-primitively reconstructed James Bond soundtrack string-beats, etc.. But the Tara Clerkin Trio is so infinitely much more than that. There are elements of avant-pop, modern classical, kraut-folk, audio verité, dare I say indie rock (and not of the beer guzzling, masturbatory fuzz-flex variety but perhaps more like a Trish Keenan-fronted Faust, Adrian Sherwood at the mixing desk of If You're Feeling Sinister, or - in expanding on our alternate reality - a world in which High Llamas cut a full-length for Warp Records with Andrew Weatherall on coffee duty).- Ryan Davis (Chicago, February 2026)

Various Artists - Forro Do Brasil [COMPACT DISCS] England - Import date 06/22/2004