Shapes & Time by Lullatone

I’ve always thought there's something magical about recordings that sound rough and unpolished. It’s as if not sounding perfect makes them more sincere - like they’re telling the listener a little secret.

Choosing the way you record something isn’t just technical. It’s an aesthetic choice - like deciding the type of materials you’d use in a painting. Light and airy like a watercolor? Hyper detailed on a smooth surface like photorealism? Dreamy slabs of impressionistic oil? You could have the same subject but express it in a totally different way with all of these little decisions. The same rule goes for melodies too - an intimidating but exciting chance!

Compared to notes scribbled on a sheet of staff paper, or instruments strummed at a show, recorded music hangs on choices of texture. The shapes of the sounds’ waves enter your ear holes and tickle little hairs inside your head making music something you truly do feel.

For this album I wanted to explore ways of recording that we hadn’t tried on older records. New textures for the tones, new shapes for the sounds. So I split it up. Instead of recording everything all at once, I decided to give each one a bit of time - one track per month. At the end of year we were left with this album, a little family of soft-spoken experiments.

Although a lot of these melodies probably don’t seem “experimental” at first, they really were all born out of tiny trials and errors around the studio - some more ridiculous than you might imagine.

If you have a little time to spend, I’d love to tell you some stories about them in the info section of each track on here.


Official press blurb:

“Shapes & Time” is an introspective new album by Lullatone. Imagine music for reading books, watering houseplants or just spending some time from the Nagoya-based band. The CD also comes with a 32 page zine with essays about their recording adventures (underwater microphones, sand placed over speaker cones, etc), guitar tabs, sheet music, illustrations and more. Lovingly recorded on various tape machines, this is Lullatone’s warmest record yet. Where Lullatone’s last album “Music for Museum Gift Shops' ' focused on piano, this new album is mainly based on peaceful guitar tones. The calming acoustic sound of the recordings feels like warming up with a coffee or tea on a cold morning. Though not quite classical, these sweater weather instrumentals blend into the background to make ordinary everyday life feel like a scene from a small film - whether you’re trying to focus and study or taking an afternoon catnap on a rainy day, the acoustic melodies can fade into the background.

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