Laurentian Voyage by Scout Island

Named for a forested retreat on Wisconsin’s Shell Lake, Scout Island is the vessel for Jungle Gym audio boss Jared Carrigan’s instrumental guitar vignettes. His latest, Laurentian Voyage, charts a trip down river through the North Woods of Minnesota and beyond, a formative landscape of his youth (recently revisited during Covidian isolation). The collection’s 19 tracks flow through twilight psych, sunset jangle, dockside devotionals, and whispering pines soft rock, a gallery of glimpses into scenes and seasons come and gone.

Lean guitars ripple, riff, and reverberate, complemented with filtered drum loops, organ, synth, or bass. The mood sways between reverie and reflection but skews more autumnal as it unfolds, a sense of waning days, paler light, campfires long gone cold. Even so, the embers of memory cast their own warmth: faces, cabins, summers, music drifting out across the water. Fleeting moments, captured in snippets of strings and melody, slicing through choppy waves like the nose of a boat towards a setting sun.