Hot New Joint: "Yesterday, This Would Have Meant So Much to Us" by Tape Loop Orchestra

The fact that this limited edition CD-R sold out in less than 24 hours upon its release speaks volumes of the kind of material that Andrew Hargraves is releasing under the moniker the Tape Loop Orchestra.

A simple glance at the canon TLO over the course of the last three years cements the fact that Hargraves continues to pretty much slay anything in his path—2011’s Maybe I Told A Small Lie, 2012’s 2xLP The Word on My Lips is Your Name/The Burnley Brass Band Plays On in My Heart, and then my third favorite record of 2013—the masterful In A Lonely Place.

This new piece, the single 22-minute composition, “Yesterday, This Would Have Meant So Much to Us,” is like nothing he’s ever committed to tape before. Recorded live for a French radio session, gone are the lo-fi, cassette deck aesthetics from his previous pieces, and they are replaced with an incredibly rich, warmth sound.

That may be in part to the fact that it opens slowly, and unfolds very deliberately, by using lengthy, brooding, and sweeping strings, along with gentle percussion and piano flourishes. If your life was a movie, and in every moment you were haunted by something, or just unfathomably sad—roughly the first five minutes to “Yesterday” would be your soundtrack.

The layered somber strings eventually give way to a more familiar sounding eerie tone—distorted and disembodied voices overpower the second half of the track, shifting the feeling from organic warmth to something very ghostly, nearly mechanical, and unbelievably chilling.

In the final six minutes, everything else is stripped away; leaving the slowly cascading waves of what sounds like a bowed xylophone and warbled, distant piano strains to carry you out to the end.

In the press material for “Yesterday,” released by British imprint Hibernate Records for their on going “Postcard Series” of limited edition CD-Rs, it’s noted that Hargraves was approached by the label head to contribute something new, but at that time, was not in the right headspace to work on new ambient music—favoring instead his work with vocalist Beth Roberts on harsher electronic music as The Mistys. Instead, he went through his archives and found this piece, recorded during a small run of live shows from 2012.

As part of a run of only 100 copies, there is currently no digital release planed for “Yesterday.” Only a six-minute excerpt is available to stream from Hibernate’s Bandcamp page. So, really, only the very elitist of the ambient elite snapped this up (me being one of those) prior to it selling out. If you’re lucky maybe an overpriced copy will turn up on Discogs in the coming weeks.

The fact that all Hargrave’s work as the TLO are either self-released or limited edition pressings continues to make him one of the best kept secrets in ambient music right now. He’s the kind of secret that you just want to blurt out to everyone you know. “Yesterday This Would Have Meant So Much to Us” is another brilliant addition to his body of work as the Tape Loop Orchestra. Affecting, mysterious yet full of clarity, it is without a doubt a strong contender to end up on my list of the best songs of 2014.

"Yesterday, This Would Have Meant So Much to Us," was available as a limited edition run of 100 CD-Rs, via Hibernate Records, but is now sold out. Too bad you missed this opportunity.