Robin Saville - Lore (2023)

ISAN's Robin Saville enriches pastoral field recordings with charming synth tones, flickering rhythms and metallophone clangs on 'Lore', his fourth solo album. There's an innocent, childlike quality to Saville's music that's been present since the early days of ISAN. An avid ambler, he takes his music outdoors on 'Lore', capturing the landscape of East Anglia with his mic and recording device and letting the sounds of birds and leaves rustling guide his musical treatments. His wide-eyed wonder is palpable from the beginning, as oddly tuned clonks seem to whisper in an unintelligible language to the chirping flocks in the trees. On 'Beltane', Saville introduces a light rhythm but it still sounds like a lost children's TV theme, bubbling over with glee as it cascades across rainfall sounds and gusts of wind. The album's centerpiece is the samba-rooted 'Theberton Public Road No.1', an exotica-lite experiment that reminds us of undersung Warp/Duophonic synth fetishists Plone or even Antena. But 'Belfry' is similarly romantic, a lilting assemblage of bell chimes and bleeping synth sequences that'd be kosmische if it wasn't so English. Lovely stuff.