Halftribe - For The Summer, Or Forever

I've always found it interesting how something as external to ourselves as the weather can affect us — and in many cases, even shape us — so profoundly from within. We all know the affect that a rainy day can have on our state of being, or how drastically one's outlook can change with just a little bit of sunshine. But what about the change of seasons? If a slight fluctuation in temperature can alter our perceptions of the world, even for just a short moment, imagine the unconsciously transformative effect the change in seasons must have on our very being. Living in a city as seasonally fluctuating as Toronto, I often picture the spring thaw that follows our harsh Canadian winters literally melting away a cold, distant part of myself that slowly formed over the winter months to make room for a space of nurturing and warmth, a space where I can begin to grow once more to my full potential. In the summer months, I become more caring, more creative, more passionate.

Short of leaving my family and friends and the city I love for warmer climates, is it possible for me to hold on to these things throughout the rest of the year — or even for just a little bit longer? Ryan Bissett's third album as Halftribe, For The Summer, Or Forever (released May 18th on Dronarivm), seems to argue that summer is not merely the sun or the warmth on your skin — it can also be a place deep within ourselves that we can take with us wherever we go. A place that can last forever.

Matching the humid, city nightscape atmospheres of its album art, For The Summer, or Forever opens with the warm, hypnotizing blur of Sacred, a panoramic sweep of the city as seen — or heard — from the stillness of a rooftop, the long exposure of headlights leaving glowing tracers across the darkness in ghostly afterimages. Alongside the hum of the urban microcosm also exist the sounds of the natural world, sourced from unexpected means; pastoral landscapes sound as if carved with the lazercut focus of a highly advanced technology, a workshop of terrestrial creation for scales both planetary and molecular. Title track For The Summer, Or Forever warbles synthetically in and out of phase, imitating the flow and gurgles of a gentle stream, weightless piano notes dropping like dew from leaves and field recordings of lush wildlife painting a picture of some idealistic and untouched corner of the natural world so tranquil it almost seems wrong to impose, while Balm flickers like a cloud of glittering luminescence under a calm surface of water, drifting downstream with it's own light source carried within.

With track times that are unexpectedly short for a genre often characterized by long-form patience, the songs on For The Summer, Or Forever, though drifting and abstract, also contain an unexpected directness, each brief sketch immediately evocative and summoning it's own distinct emotions and sense of place within mere moments, before dissipating back into the ether as if never existing in the first place — not unlike the fleeting intangibility of a feeling: all consuming one moment, impossible to describe the next. Swimming Off That Sombre Shore seems to just barely exist, the glowing exoskeleton of a techno-dub track disassembled into it's most ghostly components, containing a mysterious allure while also eluding any one form long enough to grasp on to, a dark, shifting mist constantly out of reach.

Though undeniably tranquil, the music on For The Summer, Or Forever is never still — the songs seeming to drift, however leisurely, between destinations. This sense of movement and change is demonstrated most clearly on the aptly named From One Point To Another, a track of half-formed rhythms accentuated not by elements of percussion, but rather from the moments of empty space and intervaled silence between swelling drones, like the steady beacon of a light tower. With gentle guidance and the weightlessness of surrender, For The Summer, or Forever seems to flow like the translucent waypoints of a massive open world RPG, each glowing pathway a mere suggestion opening up to hundreds more — a world of endless potential, and an anchor for when you get lost. Never concerned with the destination, Halftribe's newest album demonstrates the value of the journey, an appreciation for the reflection and stillness found along the way, and the knowledge that the most profound realizations often occur while on the road, in the grasp of a beautiful, endless summer.

https://dronarivm.bandcamp.com/album/for-the-summer-or-forever

https://halftribe.bandcamp.com/album/for-the-summer-or-forever