Will Yates keeps on with the prolific output with this latest Memotone LP for the equally relentless Trilogy Tapes. It's no small challenge keeping up with both artist and label, such is the volume with which they turn out new music, but heed this: if you've dropped off in recent times, now's your time to tune back in. Every year, there's at least one break-out TT's release (Rezzett, CS+Kreme, Kitchen Cynics, The Gerogerigegege++), and Tollard might just be the one for 2024. Searching out the overlapping spaces between U.K. folktronica, the Japanese Soundscape Series and the shared world of Chicago School and Bristolian post-rock, it’s an adventurous combination of soothing ambience, jazz-time and eerie composition. Given those reference points, it's a record that feels very of the moment, a confluence of cratedigger exploration and solitary creative production, the kind of thing that arises when you’ve the tools to explore infinitely and the time to indulge your every inspiration. I keep calling this kind of thing post-NTS music making and sorry if that's annoying, but how else to explain the uniting of such disparate sounds and ideas, and the presence of an audience to understand it? Not exactly collagistic, nor palimpsestic, but Tollard does present like the modern equivalent of record collector rock, a balancing act of ideas, digressions, impulses that are one part uncannily familiar and another entirely - and boldly - itself. However you choose to understand it, you'll find multiple worlds within its layers to merit multiple returns.
