Tor Lundvall Last Light Transparent Purple Vinyl Edition

Originally released as a hand-numbered CD on New Year's Eve of2004, Last Light captures Tor Lundvall's hushed songcraft at its mostghostly and grayscale, stripped bare like branches bracing for winter.Initially conceived of as "a piano album with sparse electronics" (with theworking title November), Lundvall's palette steadily expanded,incorporating synthesizer, samples, bass, metronomes, and his signaturespectral vocals. A journal entry from the spring of 2002 proved formativeto his evolving vision: "I remember watching the blueish-grey lightshimmering outside and hearing distant sounds echoing far away,eventually sinking into silence and stillness."The album's 12 tracks are steeped in this sense of autumnal transience,of bearing witness to what fades. The music moves in whispered swells,between dirge, drift, and devotional. Synths chime like slow-tolling bells;percussion shuffles and shivers, icy and isolated; bass traces a lowliddedplod - it's a mode both austere and seductive, lulling the listenerinto its landscapes of deepening dusk. Lyrically, Lundvall's languageskews observational and depressive ("through lace curtains / grey lightfalls / dark clouds gather / in my soul"), with each song like a gauzyglimpse into a different tableau framing winter's descent: rust-coloredleaves, frozen ponds, cold crescent moons.Lundvall has long considered Last Light a "personal favorite" in hisdiscography, and it's easy to hear why. In texture, finesse, and pacing, itvividly evokes the rare mood of fragile, frosty pastoral noir depicted in hisiconic oil paintings. His is an art of the half-seen and half-remembered, offleeting figures, shapes and shadows, and gathering darkness. Of all thatdisappears, and the ghosts that never leave: "So I wait / as the years /slowly drain the magic and the light / and the girl / I never loved / hauntsme through the dark roads of my life."