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William Doyle

Slowly Arranged: 2016-2019 (2024 Repress)

very limited white 4lp boxset (300 only) - £31.99 | Buy
It’s nearing a decade since William Doyle released his Mercury Music Prize nominated debut album, 'Total Strife Forever', as East India Youth in 2...
William Doyle

Near Future Residence (2024 Repress)

lp - £11.99 | Buy
'Near Future Residence' is music for an imagined place based on real ideas; the soundtrack for an ecologically sustainable housing development somewhere...
William Doyle

Lightnesses I & II (2024 Repress)

2lp - £14.99 | Buy
'Lightnesses Vol I & II' sees Doyle create what we might understand as true ambient music – that is, music intended for the background that wa...
William Doyle

The Dream Derealised (2024 Repress)

lp - £11.99 | Buy
A collection of nine abstract, lo-fi pieces that were recorded during the summer of 2016, when focusing on creating them helped guide Doyle through a “dif...
William Doyle

Springs Eternal

cd - £13.99 | Buy
Doyle's latest is a revelation of bucolic electro-acoustic pop wonderment - he might have swapped his muddy boots for something more dancefloor appropriate ...

See also...

ANNA B SAVAGE

A COMMON TURN

140g lp + download - £18.99 | Buy
Savage’s arresting debut digs its claws into your soul & then floors you with its fiery, foreboding but vulnerable delivery.
Field Music

MAKING A NEW WORLD

cd - £9.99 | Buy
love record stores edition - Transparent 180g red LP + signed print - £19.99 | Buy
Field Music have been busy! Not content with the current state of affairs, they have set about ‘making a new world’ and, oh my, have they made a fan...
Great Spans of Muddy Time
  1. I Need To Keep You In My Life
  2. And Everything Changed (But I Feel Alright)
  3. Somewhere Totally Else
  4. Shadowtackling
  5. Who Cares
  6. Nothing At All
  7. Rainfalls
  8. New Uncertainties
  9. St. Giles’ Hill
  10. Semi-bionic
  11. A Forgotten Film
  12. Theme from Muddy Time
  13. [a sea of thoughts behind it]

dinked edition 91

●       ‘Algal Bloom’ Colour Vinyl *

●       Hand-Numbered *

●       Bonus 7” feat. 2 exclusive songs

●      Edition of 500

* exclusive to Dinked Edition

doyle-dinked

William Doyle

Great Spans of Muddy Time

tough love
  • limited 'pelican white' lp

    Released: 19th Mar 2021

    £19.99
    Buy

An elegiac treatise on letting go, a wobbly pop masterpiece & quite likely the only album on this list inspired by Monty Don.

William Doyle’s bucolic electronica invokes trampled leaves & mud-flecked corduroys via the ruminative synthesis & skittering percussion that deftly wends through each enveloping track. Couple this with vocals that echo the soaring greatness of the likes of Robert Wyatt & Robyn Hitchcock & the world created on ‘Great Spans Of Muddy Time’ begins to bear more than a passing resemblance to that of Edward Gorey’s pen or the cosy homestead of the eponymous family in ‘Flowers’. In short, it’s a place of wonder that’ll burrow its way into your heart like an eager, snuggling cat.

Blending pet shop boys-esque energy with art-pop leftfieldism, doyle’s latest solo album under his own name is a vividly realised world of breathy electronics & endless eccentric flourishes. It’s nearly a decade since William Doyle handed a CD-R demo to the Quietus co-founder John Doran at a gig, who loved it so much he set up a label to release Doyle’s debut EP (as East India Youth). Doyle’s debut album, 'Total Strife Forever', followed in 2014, as did a nomination for the Mercury Music Prize. A year later, he was signed to XL, touring the world and about to release his second album – all by the age of 25.

After self-releasing four ambient and instrumental albums, Doyle’s third full-length record – and the first under his own name – 'Your Wilderness Revisited' arrived to ecstatic reviews in 2019: Line of Best Fit described it as “a dazzlingly beautiful triumph of intention” and Metro declared it an album not only of the year, but “of the century”. Just over a year later, as he turns 30, Doyle is back with 'Great Spans of Muddy Time'.

Born from accident but driven forward by instinct, 'Great Spans’ was built from the remnants of a catastrophic hard-drive failure. With his work saved only to cassette tape, Doyle was forced to accept the recordings as they were – a sharp departure from his process on 'Your Wilderness Revisited', which took four long years to craft toward perfection. “Instead of feeling a loss that I could no longer craft these pieces into flawless ‘Works of Art’, I felt intensely liberated that they had been set free from my ceaseless tinkering,” Doyle says.

“The album this turned out to be – and that I’ve wanted to make for ages – is a kind of Englishman-gone-mad, scrambling around the verdancy of the country’s pastures looking for some sense,” says Doyle. “It has its seeds in Robert Wyatt, early Eno, Robyn Hitchcock, and Syd Barrett.” Doyle credits Bowie’s ever-influential Berlin trilogy, but also highlights a much less expected muse: Monty Don, presenter of the BBC programme Gardeners’ World, Doyle’s lockdown addiction.

“I became obsessed with Monty Don. I like his manner and there's something about him I relate to. He once described periods of depression in his life as consisting of ‘nothing but great spans of muddy time’. When I read that quote I knew it would be the title of this record,” Doyle says. “Something about the sludgy mulch of the album’s darker moments, and its feel of perpetual autumnal evening, seemed to fit so well with those words. I would also be lying if I said it didn’t chime with my mental health experiences as well.”

'Great Spans of Muddy Time' is a beautiful ode to the power of accident, instinct and intuition. The result, however, is far from an anomaly: this celebration of the imperfect album is one that required years of honed craft and dedicated focus to achieve. “For the first time in my career, the distance between what I hear and what the listener hears is paper-thin,” Doyle says. “Perhaps therein reveals a deeper truth that the perfectionist brain can often dissolve.”

 

Tom says "A near perfect leftfield pop record. A masterpiece in my opinion, and will you just look at that front cover? Jeez! The AOTY gauntlet has been thrown down."