Tor Lundvall - Last Light - VINYL LP

Upstate New York artist Tor Lundvall's music often evokes a sense of soft-focus autumnal melancholia but nowhere is this atmosphere more explicit and evocative than his self-released 2006 holiday album, Yule, newly reissued by Dais Records. Inspired by childhood memories of Inchcold, dark eveningsInch waiting for his mother outside shops and supermarkets while seasonal songs drifted faintly on the frozen air, the collection feels appropriately hushed and hypnagogic, half-remembered melodies heard through falling snow.Steady muted rhythmic pulses wind through wintry landscapes of icy synthetic textures, glass bells, and distant metallic echoes, occasionally framed by Lundvall's soft, dazed vocals, narrating scenes of Inchslushy, illuminated train stationsInch and Inchthe lonely trees of January, still entangled with blue lights long after the season has ended.Inch It's a music of barren branches, crescent moons, and willowy figures shuffling and shivering on their way somewhere, viewed from a fogged window passing by, or high above.As with Lundvall's signature oil paintings, Yule's sonic vignettes are works of observation, poetic glimpses rendered in gradients of color and quiet. He has referred to his music in the past as Inchghost ambientInch and, although his songwriting here skews more foreground than background, the phrase aptly captures the haunted, half-light quality of these fragile tracks. 10 miniatures of wreathed streets and silent woods, of twinkling store windows seen from a distance, the sensation of being outside of life looking in - the sentiments that seeded Lundvall's vision remain undimmed InchThere was a special melancholic beauty about these moments that has never left me.Inch Album Tracks 1. Busy Station 2. The Train Home 3. Christmas Eve 4. 12 00 Am 5. Snowy Morning 6. Yule Song 7. Fading Light 8. January 9. White on Grey

Originally released as a hand-numbered CD on New Year's Eve of 2004, Last Light captures Tor Lundvall's hushed songcraft at it's most ghostly and grayscale, stripped bare like branches bracing for winter. Initially conceived of as Incha piano album with sparse electronicsInch (with the working title November), Lundvall's palette steadily expanded, incorporating synthesizer, samples, bass, metronomes, and his signature spectral vocals. A journal entry from the spring of 2002 proved formative to his evolving vision InchI remember watching the blueish-grey light shimmering outside and hearing distant sounds echoing far away, eventually sinking into silence and stillness.InchThe album's 12 tracks are steeped in this sense of autumnal transience, of bearing witness to what fades. The music moves in whispered swells, between dirge, drift, and devotional. Synths chime like slow-tolling bells; percussion shuffles and shivers, icy and isolated; bass traces a low- lidded plod - it's a mode both austere and seductive, lulling the listener into it's landscapes of deepening dusk. Lyrically, Lundvall's language skews observational and depressive (Inchthrough lace curtains / grey light falls / dark clouds gather / in my soulInch), with each song like a gauzy glimpse into a different tableau framing winter's descent rust-colored leaves, frozen ponds, cold crescent moons.Lundvall has long considered Last Light a Inchpersonal favoriteInch in his discography, and it's easy to hear why. In texture, finesse, and pacing, it vividly evokes the rare mood of fragile, frosty pastoral noir depicted in his iconic oil paintings. His is an art of the half-seen and half-remembered, of fleeting figures, shapes and shadows, and gathering darkness. Of all that disappears, and the ghosts that never leave InchSo I wait / as the years / slowly drain the magic and the light / and the girl / I never lov

New York painter and musician exploratory industrialist Tor Lundvall initially envisioned his 14th album, Beautiful Illusions, as an entirely instrumental affair, Inchinspired by memories of sitting in a church or cathedral watching the shifting sunlight through stained glass.Inch Although he ultimately chose to wreath the majority of the tracks with hushed, poetic vocals, his original muse still resonates. These are certainly songs of shadowplay and vaulted skies, the quiet grandeur of dusk deepening on the horizon. Lundvall characterizes the lyrical subject matter, too, in ways both specific and surreal, exploring Inchthe doubts, the anxieties and even the bleak fantasies the mind spirals into during moments of isolation, separation and distance.Inch Tricks of the eye, mind, and ear, magnified by silence and the looming long winter. Shivering pulses and muted bass lines tread the twilight while icicle synths and wiry guitar map the melody until the voice enters, narrating oblique moods of essence and absence, tenderness and truth. Glimpses of dark humor flicker in the wordplay but the greater sonic landscape is one of falling leaves and failing light, small gestures rendered as revelation, cloaked in reverb and spatial fog. Lundvall's mastery of nuance and negative space continues to heighten, whispered brushstrokes of the invisible and the unsaid, what lies beneath and what lies beyond InchBehind the shields and false fronts is usually a sadness. The heartbreaking reflections of what might have been.Inch Album Tracks 1. Their Souls 2. Forever Rain 3. Drowning 4. Blessings Counted 5. Love Song 6. Four Bluebirds 7. Lonely Boy 8. Two Windows