Traveller by Warren Sampson

Love All Day follows up last year’s Planetary Peace reissue with Warren Sampson’s little-known ambient masterpiece Traveller. Hailing from Minnesota and inspired by the early work of Brian Eno and Jon Hassell, Sampson infused their compositional modes with a self-effacing and distinctly Upper Midwest approach that is equal parts isolated and expansive. Traveller was recorded in a bedroom closet studio on a four-track TEAC reel-to-reel between the late 1970s through the mid 1980s. Not long after its release in 1987, almost all of the copies of the LP ended up in a landfill.

We’re proud to be able to (re)introduce such a marvelous, humanity filled work back into the world. Palpably conjuring the subtle, dimming, crystalline beauty of a Northern midwinter twilight via skeletal guitars, icy keyboard tones, and slowly shifting drones, Sampson magically collapses that vast big open into the reflection found on a single frozen leaf. Traveller is a weirdly out-of-time record, very much anticipating the post-rock catalog of a (Midwest) label like Kranky, or any number of the new artists we work with here at Love All Day, while at the same time recalling contemporaries like K. Leimer or Marc Barreca for Palace of Lights.

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