Each record cover is lovingly hand painted by the artist Aimée Henderson and is signed & stamped on the reverse. The record comes in a clear sleeve with gold label, along with insert and 'Music room' postcard. Edition of 300.
A Happy Return's third album is ostensibly the product of two things: family and geography. Nominally a duo of Mat Fowler and Aimée Henderson (who also hand paints each cover), and occasionally assisted by their young daughter Anges, the group construct (and this feels like the appropriate adjective) a type of intimate, homemade ambi-folk song from tapes, strings, electronics and found sound that feels especially tied to their locale in a fairly remote part of Scotland. If these seem like obvious observations to make (of course family shapes art, of course location influences how it arrives in the world), they are nonetheless impossible to ignore. How else to explain a type of music-making that seems so in-and-of-itself? Hermetic and insular yes, but supremely good natured and, perhaps not something we always first associate with experimental music, joyful too. These are not so much songs as the kind of phatic sounds that occur amidst trust, assurance and mutual understanding. Out in those further reaches of Scotland where space is bigger and people are less, expressions like Hamewith are a kind of fire to gather around. A Happy Return are self-releasing the record and have gone to great lengths to make each one look beuatiful, so to some extent there must be an imagined audience in mind. Still, what makese Hamewith so appealing is that you are afforded the sense that even if no-one were to tune in, this music would still hold the greatest of value to its creators. Art for art's sake of course, but crucially, for love's sake, too.
FFO: Deux Filles, Woo, Idea Fire Company, Bons, early His Name Is Alive
