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Tristan Louth-Robins “Borrowed Out Of Time” LP

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Description

**Pre-order: shipping February/March 2025**

Borrowed Out Of Time is the latest album by Kaurna Country artist and
writer, Tristan Louth-Robins. It follows a steadily paced run of
releases for labels like 3LEAVES (2013’s The Path Described) and his own
Studio Maurilia which share an inquisitive spirit, informed by, but
different from, influences such as Alvin Lucier and Rolf Julius. While
Tristan’s compositions might be neatly situated somewhere adjacent to
both sound art and acoustic ecology, they aren’t beholden to those
genres, and his work with field recordings and composition are smart in
their suggestive possibilities. Borrowed Out Of Time feels like a step
forward for Tristan; it makes sense that it’s his first full-length
vinyl release, made real by Adelaide’s redoubtable De La Catessen
imprint.

Tristan is one of those consistent presences within Adelaide’s network
of experimental musicians, sound artists, and general refuseniks. I
remember him always being around, but at a remove from the circles I was
in, and he seemed, at the time, aligned more with sound art and
conservatorium practices, though that was a reductive understanding of
the complexity of Tristan’s thinking, even two decades ago. It’s been
lovely to catch up with his music on Borrowed Out Of Time and get to
grips with both the eloquence of the compositional approaches he’s
arrived at here, and the sensitivity of his listening and recording;
even in MP3 form, this is a lovely record to listen to.

The album itself started with Tristan’s use of remote acoustic
recorders. Deploying them to a reef at low tide, near his hometown in
Normanville, he found himself empathising with these lonely, passive
technological presences: “It was the first time I could remember a
profound pang of something for what the technology was experiencing,
sensing and ‘feeling’.” A loosely contemporaneous encounter with James
Bridie’s Ways Of Being and the concept of unwelt (“the way non-human
things sense and experience the world around them”), plus a commission
for an installation work for Adelaide
Festival’s Neoterica, nudged Tristan further in the album’s direction,
thinking through ideas of the uncanny/unheimlich and interference.

If that material, plus other recordings sourced from those acoustic
recorders, proffers the groundwork for Borrowed Out Of Time, Tristan’s
embellishments and extrapolations in his home studio bring other voices
to bear – a Tama acoustic guitar; tape hiss; digital noise; cymbals;
fence wire; ring modulation; yet more – producing a suite of four works
that strike as gently poignant, even as they deal with source material
that is sometimes disembodied, denaturalised, or rendered adrift through
processes of compositional dislocation. Reflecting on his ways of
making, Tristan mentions, “A lot of my compositional process nowadays
errs on the side of being very tactile,” and you can definitely hear
that in Borrowed Out Of Time, alongside a spatialised dimension to the
material that is maybe drawn from other studio practices – “I frequently
spread sounds out in the space using many loudspeakers of different
sizes, so I can move these around and treat them by covering them with
bowls, turning them upside down, or placing them under or within
resonant vessels.”

Throughout, I hear a cussed curiosity and a sharpness in attention,
coupled with a compositional ear that’s hitherto been mostly implied;
now, though, Tristan’s music has achieved an easeful poetics that has no
need to ask you to be enamoured of it. It’s simply there, smartly
designed, inviting even at its most austere, ready to welcome you to its
world, on its own terms, but with warmth and understated wit. (Jon Dale)

Additional information

Weight .25 kg
Dimensions .05 × 31 × 31 cm