*150 copies limited release* "Borrowed Out Of Time is the latest album by Kaurna Country artist and writer, Tristan Louth-Robins. It follows a steadily paced run of releases for labels like 3LEAVES (2013’s The Path Described) and his own Studio Maurilia which share an inquisitive spirit, informed by, but different from, influences such as Alvin Lucier and Rolf Julius. While Tristan’s compositions might be neatly situated somewhere adjacent to both sound art and acoustic ecology, they aren’t beholden to those genres, and his work with field recordings and composition are smart in their suggestive possibilities. Borrowed Out Of Time feels like a step forward for Tristan; it makes sense that it’s his first full-length vinyl release, made real by Adelaide’s redoubtable De La Catessen imprint.

Tristan is one of those consistent presences within Adelaide’s network of experimental musicians, sound artists, and general refuseniks. I remember him always being around, but at a remove from the circles I was in, and he seemed, at the time, aligned more with sound art and conservatorium practices, though that was a reductive understanding of the complexity of Tristan’s thinking, even two decades ago. It’s been lovely to catch up with his music on Borrowed Out Of Time and get to grips with both the eloquence of the compositional approaches he’s arrived at here, and the sensitivity of his listening and recording; even in MP3 form, this is a lovely record to listen to.

The album itself started with Tristan’s use of remote acoustic recorders. Deploying them to a reef at low tide, near his hometown in Normanville, he found himself empathising with these lonely, passive technological presences: “It was the first time I could remember a profound pang of something for what the technology was experiencing, sensing and ‘feeling'.” A loosely contemporaneous encounter with James Bridie’s Ways Of Being and the concept of unwelt (“the way non-human things sense and experience the world around them”), plus a commission for an installation work for Adelaide Festival’s Neoterica, nudged Tristan further in the album’s direction, thinking through ideas of the uncanny/unheimlich and interference.

If that material, plus other recordings sourced from those acoustic recorders, proffers the groundwork for Borrowed Out Of Time, Tristan’s embellishments and extrapolations in his home studio bring other voices to bear – a Tama acoustic guitar; tape hiss; digital noise; cymbals; fence wire; ring modulation; yet more – producing a suite of four works that strike as gently poignant, even as they deal with source material that is sometimes disembodied, denaturalised, or rendered adrift through processes of compositional dislocation. Reflecting on his ways of making, Tristan mentions, “A lot of my compositional process nowadays errs on the side of being very tactile,” and you can definitely hear that in Borrowed Out Of Time, alongside a spatialised dimension to the material that is maybe drawn from other studio practices – “I frequently spread sounds out in the space using many loudspeakers of different sizes, so I can move these around and treat them by covering them with bowls, turning them upside down, or placing them under or within resonant vessels.”

Throughout, I hear a cussed curiosity and a sharpness in attention, coupled with a compositional ear that’s hitherto been mostly implied; now, though, Tristan’s music has achieved an easeful poetics that has no need to ask you to be enamoured of it. It’s simply there, smartly designed, inviting even at its most austere, ready to welcome you to its world, on its own terms, but with warmth and understated wit." - Jon Dale