Ivan The Tolerable Black Water/Brown Earth White Vinyl Edition

Available on ltd edition white vinyl, only 300 pressed. Includes extended album download.

Ivan The Tolerable is the alter ego solo project of Middlesbrough based musical wizard Oli Heffernan. Aside from his solo work as ITT, Oli has played in numerous bands over the years including Year Of Birds, King Champion Sounds with members of the Ex, Detective Instinct, and Shrug, and has collaborated with icons like Mike Watts of the Minutemen, and J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr.

On Black Water/Brown Earth, Heff called in the help of his Dutch friends Mees and Elsa in King Champion Sounds again and wrote the album in a long-distance session. The album feels like an excursion in nature, featuring bird song, flowing water, pots and pans percus-sion, and a genuine feel of wandering about and experiencing the outside world with eyes and ears wide open. It is a band effort too, with organic sounding drums, the characteristic saxophone, and droning synths.

Weird Shrine - https://weirdoshrine.wordpress.com/2022/11/08/review-qa-ivan-the-tolerable-black-water-brown-earth-the-aleph-2022-up-in-her-room-records-echodelick-records/

‘Elsewhere, gentle intonations of morning with almost childlike embellishments and rhythmic beats, and more flute, might lull and com-fort but nothing ever sits exactly in time which might make this Ivan The Tolerable’s most frustrating album at times but also one of his most interesting to really delve into aurally. ‘Sawdust’ is another sonic interlude, little more than a purge of effects and ideas but in a place where effects and ideas are plentiful. However, it’s centrepieces ‘Seaweed’ and ‘Signs’ that provide the pulsing, grooving dual that makes the second half of Black Water/Brown Earth a sheer delight. The former being simply kind of folky with a bit of sitar but utterly immersive, the latter oddly upbeat with eastern vibes and tubular rhythms, combined it is nearly twenty minutes of serene experimental-ism.

The shorter tracks are perhaps designed to temper the mood or counter and reflect the passage of time on an album of mostly struc-tured improvisation, and it may only be closer ‘Memory’ that is truly free to roam musically, its long jazzy segments skipping off into the farthest corners of the left field’.