The Humble Seaman - 120 5x5 (2021)

The Humble Seaman are Craig Tattersall (The Humble Bee) & Bill Seaman, here uniting under a brief designed to test their creative instincts. Working to an unforgivingly short deadline, the pair began, developed and completed recording over a 2 week period, with results infused with barely-there, quietly melodic swells suggestive of Tattersall's singular output, but with an added dose of introspection that will greatly appeal to anyone who has sunk into Elodie’s recordings over recent years.

Never one to complete work off the cuff, Tattersall palpably benefits from the intuitive process and Seaman’s multi-disciplinary propulsion, imbuing proceedings with a more contained energy that allows each piece to unfurl at its own pace, with added focus. Where once these pieces might have developed over a more expansive space, here they evolve over single minutes - making for a more impactful hit, but one that's still decidedly lowercase and intimate.

By this point Tattersall is basically a genre all to himself; his sound is so distinctly his own that hearing it deployed around Seaman’s styling offers a variation on a theme, with washes of melodica, piano and electronics weaving sound tapestries in miniature, each spread over four or five minutes of quietly decayed soundscaping that replicates a sort of non-linear dream sequence. It’s only with the closing piece ‘the anthem of quiet’ that things open up to a more traditional arrangement of guitar and electronics, reminding us of Bruce Langhorne’s windswept ’The Hired Hand’ score, but with an added ferric quality that ditches abstraction in favour of quiet nostalgia. By Tattersall’s silent measure, it’s positively euphoric.