158: The Bird's Companion - A Place Outside of Time

I spent last week on holiday (hence the absence you may or may not have noticed), a few days away exploring somewhere new, all winding alleys, green mountains and sticky heat. A place outside of time.

In that oddly-shaped gap between going and coming back - airports at night, woozy and awkward, trying to hold on to stirred feelings - I stumbled upon the new album from Canadian musician Casey van Wensem, recorded and released under his The Bird's Companion moniker and released via the always-compelling Whitelabrecs.

Released in full at the end of this week, A Place Outside of Time finds Casey in suitably atmospheric and nostalgic territory, the three songs unveiled so far hinting at something roomy but enigmatic, an unwinding tumble of knots you can't find either end of. As the written intro to the album explains: "At the heart of this record lies a meditation on memory and the fragility of tradition. Inspired by a chapter from Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, where an entire town succumbs to amnesia, the album imagines music as a vessel to retrieve what’s slipping away." 

These songs work both in that form but also on your own terms, able to carry you on their journey or indeed seep into yours, rippling layers of ambience that play somewhere behind your eyes, secretive and alluring, the soundtrack to a dream slipping away as you try to recall its frames.

Which is to say that this is beautiful and moving, a theme to lost places and the often faceless people that move through them.

Pre-order the album on Bandcamp here

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three / six / five is a daily music-sharing project from gold flake paint; read more about the idea here

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