*Limited Edition of 500* Across the arc of Tristan Allen’s epiphanic, four-part journey, Tin Iso and the Dawn, the New York based composer and puppeteer brings sonic life to a fantastical realm of characters whose universal longings mirror our own. In the first release of this mythic trilogy, intricate sound design and spellbinding leitmotifs make sense of loss and what’s beyond. Formative exposures by way of travel through Asia, studies in Gamelan, a paper mache Christmas angel, and their dad’s Bread and Puppet Theater artifacts formed a web of inspiration from which Tristan’s desire to combine puppetry and their fascination for the narrative power of instrumental music emerged. Years of synchronistic inspirational encounters with “guardian angels” in the form of music mentors and puppeteer masters incentivized Tristan to pursue a project where they could focus on sound and diverse instrumentation.

Through this impulse, Tristan ceremoniously constructed the imaginary world of Tin Iso and the Dawn, loosely based on Wagner’s three act opera Tristan und Isolde. Composed and recorded between 2015 and 2022 across apartments from Boston to Brooklyn, with field recordings from locations of vivid sentiment: Upstate New York—where Tristan grew up, Quebec—where most of their close family lives, and Japan—where they lived briefly as a child, each moment of Tin Iso glimmers with nostalgic immediacy and the prescience of new voyages unfolding.

By composing for acoustic instruments, arranging and processing electronically, and performing the music through puppetry, Tin Iso emerged as the project that could finally satisfy Tristan’s desire to consolidate and cohere wide-ranging musical interests and an unyielding fascination for fantasy and myth. Combining music and puppetry allowed Tristan to build an imaginary world from scratch. Channeling their awe of folklore through a love of storytelling and the liberatory potential of musical composition, Tin Iso quickly took shape as a creation myth, a fable of how things came to be for a world Tristan hopes to traverse for years to come.