Written and recorded in a such a structure in the Southern French countryside, their latest release Stone House is very much a product of its surroundings. The album, out on Canigou Records, represents something of a sonic map of a very specific place, compromised of field recordings and live improvisations recorded at various positions within the building. “What we tried to depict in the music is a house with no solid walls,” explain the band, “where inside and outside blur into each other and the difference between intimacy and expanse is indeterminable.”

The thematic considerations extend to the processes involved with the artwork. Using cyanotype printing that was exposed to the sun in situ, the exterior of the tape is influenced by the surrounding environment in just the same way as the walls of the house, detailing just how complete a project Stone House represents.

The music itself is vivid and patient, possessing a slow spirit that mimics the natural rhythms of an organic environment. Tracks such as ‘Silhouette’ show a delicate lightness, the samples of chirping insects and church bells like life ongoing in the distance. Though the record is far more than bucolic countryside whimsy, single ‘Rose Gold Blue’ shows the true scope of the album. Here triumphant swells are punctuated with beats, and periodically become denatured and strange with an ominous foreboding.

The variation and experimentation continues. ‘Rain Dance’ has a lush, near primordial sparkle of life, bringing to mind the intricate soundscapes of Lejsovka & Freund, and follow-up ‘Après’ is like the precipitation called forth in the previous track. ‘Swim’ is altogether more classical and sweeping with its tidal ebb and flow, while the restrained ‘Room to Room’ has a shadowy quality that sets up the dark majesty of closer ‘Mistral’. The song could be said to represent the essence of Yamachan’s music, playful and shrouded in a certain mystery, darkness and light skittering across the canvas in an endless game of cat and mouse.

Stone House is out now via Canigou Records and you can get it from Bandcamp, including a lovely cassette edition.

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The lack of breaks or pauses provides a clear through line to the EP, allowing Barfoot to blur the distinction between styles. As such, even the most divergent sounds feel interconnected, any changes feeling not some whim of the artist but a clear progression from what has come before, leaving the listener to probe exactly how and why each development relates to the previous sound. This lends something of a supple nature to the sound, an organic plasticity like that of the mind, where wildly altering thoughts can occur, though a clear path can always be drawn between points.

Which is how haunted drone of the opening can transition into the glitchy electronic continuation, and then into the thin, ghost town echoes of the closing period without any sense of abruptness. Instead, the sonic transformations leave an intuitive impression, some esoteric logic creeping through from a world not quite our own. The description of the release calls the sound “ambient experiments with tape memories. Fragments from a nice old plateau; a thin place between worlds,” and while the sentence might not make much sense before listening, you soon discover it to be the perfect summation of Barfoot’s aesthetic.

A Thin Place Between Worlds is out now via Canigou Records and you can get it from Bandcamp, including on a limited cassette edition, complete with hand-stamped artwork, and digital.

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Opener ‘Bed’ sounds like a sonic time capsule from a rainy wartime evening, Williams’s voice rising from a dusty gramophone in the corner sounding both cinematic and distant. The delicate guitar on ‘Tired Mind’ tumbles as if caught on a breeze, the vocals supported by gentle coos and a tidal background hum, before the piano-led ‘The Rain Thief’. The track sounds somehow apprehensive, at least at first, as if someone is playing in a dark and empty room at midnight, though eventually settles into a more certain groove of melancholy.

The title track closes the EP, stretching over 8 minutes with gentle quite and Williams’s quiet croon. After the halfway mark the song descends into a rumbling, disonant noise, like a relentless wind battering a flat and barren landscape, the vocals reduced to just another brief echo in time.

You can get Wail now from the Canigou Records Bandcamp page. Its available as a digital download, or on cassette, which comes complete with a bonus track and an unique hand-drawn artwork. Oh and 10% of sales goes to Refuge, so what are you waiting for? Also, be sure to check out the Honey Stretton Soundcloud page for a few more tracks.

-Photo credit: Jack Goodwin-

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