l. pierre: the island come true

Across his many projects past and present, it's under the moniker of L. Pierre that Aidan Moffat has perhaps best opened up the bare bones of his thirst for sonic exploration. The Island Come True is Moffat's fourth album as L. Pierre and is a work assembled from the vast cavern of his assembled field recordings and samples -- a collage that works as a sonic patchwork of the artist's own mind. A popular lyrical raconteur whether as one-half of Arab Strap, writing under his own name or when collaborating with Bill Wells -- as on last year's "Scottish Album Of The Year" award-winner Everything's Getting Older -- it's as this incarnation where the true extent of his musical eclecticism is revealed. As such, the album is as a dreamscape, with fragments of classical works, drum samples, instructional speeches and, in a link back to his last album, recordings of nature. Electronics elements previously employed on past albums have been discarded, the album in its entirety consisting only of these found sounds. The record is overridden by the hissing of tape tracks and drones, and "sadness" is a word that could readily be used to describe big sections of Island Come True, a fine line trodden between soothing warmth and bleaker depths throughout. Song titles delve into the extraordinary, the surreal and, more often than not, the sinister; "KAB 1340" is the name of the radio station being listened to in John Carpenter's The Fog, "The Grief That Does Not Speak" is taken from a speech in Macbeth, "Tulpa" is a Buddhist term for a physical object brought about purely by the power of the mind. For all the wonderful work that he's put out in his various guises, it is arguably as L.Pierre where he's at his most beguiling and unexplained, collecting and sculpting these pieces of aural history together for reasons that he never quite tells us.

L. Pierre - Doctor Alucard