Tissø Lake – I Am Like a Lake: Track Premiere

Paths to the Foss is the fourth album by Tissø Lake, the Edinburgh-based band and tape music project led by Ian Humberstone. 

Best known for his solo composition work with Folklore Tapes – the fêted collective and label he founded in 2011 with David Chatton-Barker – those acquainted with Humberstone's output will find familiar ground here: warm, analogue textures with a seam of homespun experimentalism and a thirst for the old, slow mysteries of the natural world. Where this album differs is in its carefully crafted song writing, with Humberstone’s baritone the keystone to the arrangements.

Paths to the Foss was our album of the month in our December issue so we're excited to have this exclusive track premiere of I Am Like a Lake ahead of the album's release on 17 Dec.

We caught up with Humberstone to find out about the origins of the album, and I Am Like a Lake in particular: "All the songs on Paths to the Foss have some relation to a Norwegian landscape I have been revisiting for many years," he explains. "The majority were written a couple of summers ago when I worked there for a spell on a farm, but I Am like a Lake is a little different. It was written shortly after my first trip to the area as a teenager and actually appeared on the inaugural Tissø Lake album about ten years ago.

"When Tom Western, Malcolm Benzie and I were rehearsing for this new album we ended up returning to it, pulling at the melodies and twisting them into new shapes. In many ways it is the link between the old and the new music recorded under the Tissø Lake band name. Tom's skittering drums and Malcolm's haunting violin have taken the song somewhere it always wanted to go, but perhaps didn't have the legs for on its first outing."

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Paths to the Foss is released via ITLAN on 17 Dec