Humble Bee: Nightmark LP

Craig Tattersall made quite a name for himself by offering a series of consistent releases on his own imprints Cotton Goods and Other Ideas. After more than 5 years of silence, our favourite bee is finally back with 2 new full length albums: Daymark and Nightmark. Both albums are made around the same time and can be seen as complementary odes to these different and opposite parts of the day. In the 2nd part of his latest for Belgium’s Dauw, Craig Tattersall (Hood, The Boats) whispers frayed scenes for his spiritual home, poetically describing a gauzy trip into late night. Tattersall’s melodic sensibilities are more tenderly raw on the concluding part of his new album couplet. The A-side’s ‘On the stroke of the dark, keeper of the light, beacon for the heart’ he weaves in burbling music box mælody and slow breathing woodwind to his dappled keys, leading to a really gorgeous section of burned-out, hypnagogic wooze recalling Burial or Gas at their most heart-grabbing, and tailing off into trains of droning, melodic thought that really only come about once the sun has set. ‘Extinguished Light’ then blows out the candle or dampens the oil light flicker to play in the shadows with warbling, laminal, sibilant motifs that tremble off his fingers-as-tongues and gently reverberate out into the gloom, drowsily drawing us into crackling harmonic distortions that remind of Stephan Mathieu’s post-classical experiments, and come to settle in near static figures that linger in a heavy but spare air.