shroudings - Self-Titled, Vinyl LP

There’s a particular kind of record that arrives only after a long waiting. Grown slowly, the way lichen takes a decade to cover a stone. shroudings, the debut self-titled solo album from Blue Mountains multi-instrumentalist Robin Dixon, is one of these. Recording began in 2014; something is ready for us in 2026.

The years were marked by much change: a relationship begun and ended, two children born, a stroke. Dixon, an academic and historian by inclination as much as by trade, treats his own upheavals the way he treats an old ballad: as material to be turned over, reset, sung through rather than sung about. The stroke, in 2023, took away his ability to play some of the parts he'd intended to record himself. What it gave back, in time, was a spirit of collaboration, rediscovery and reinvention.

Eight songs, twelve years, nineteen musicians. Natural constraint governs; no electric or electronic instruments feature. What you do hear is wood, gut, brass and breath. Arrangements are unobtrusive and delicate: harp, cello, pump organ, parlour guitar, muted trumpet, vibraphone, dulcimer, and a jazz kit brushed rather than struck. Every song carries at least one woman's voice or hand in its making: Mirabai Peart's violin, Jess Randall's fiddle, Phillippa Murphy-Haste and Flora Carbo, and the distinctive voices of Alex Tolmie, Hannah Pelka- Caven, Natasha Koch and Sonia Zadro, among the album's many other collaborators. All combining so that Dixon's tenor, warm and understated, is forever being answered rather than left to carry things alone.

Initial tracking was done at Everland Studios with Ben Worsey. Producer Tony Dupé (with Claire Deak adding harp and keys) helped record overdubs, arrange and mix the songs into a cohesive whole, using among other things, a 1970s German tape delay that lends the recording its particular grain and haze, the sound of something paused being asked to speak again.

Water recurs. And so does motion: narrators walking, rowing, riding trains toward something they can't quite name. For touchstones, you might hear the spare drift of Talk Talk's Laughing Stock, an echo of Nick Drake's autumnal sigh, Leonard Cohen's angelic-women vocal arrangements, Dead Can Dance's Celtic gravity, and something of Joanna Newsom's glisten.

But mostly shroudings asks to be heard as its own quiet argument: that making something, with others, in the wreck and after the wreck, might be reason enough to keep going. It’s a beautiful, patient record. Give it your evening.