About "The Shipyard"
Previously, Tor Lundvall had introduced the haunting album, Sleeping & Hiding, and the resilient The Seasons Unfold box set. As a counterweight, Tor Lundvall assembled The Shipyard, a thematic instrumental album capturing the artist's threshold between the real and the imaginary. The Shipyard was recorded during the dramatic season change-over of 2009/10, during which time Lundvall was immersing himself in portrait studies of local maritime themes and nautical life at the docks. This instrumental collection of songs composed the soundtrack to the final renderings of these conceptual ideas put side by side, for which semblance he is most known for.
"In the Autumn of 1990, I documented a handful of spontaneous audio experiments on a portable tape recorder. One of these pieces was a quiet instrumental entitled 'In a Shipyard'. I worked on a few variations over the following months and then I put the track to rest, hoping to expand on the idea at some point in the future. Almost 20 years later, I finally started recording an album based on the themes and images this old track evoked.
'The Shipyard in Winter' was the first new recording to take shape. This track was constructed around the soft, mechanical loop I used in my original demos. I then altered the loop to construct 'The Shipyard at Dawn' and 'The Shipyard at Night'.
The nautical and industrial sounds on the album were created from scratch and come from some surprising sources. The distant, sluggish melody on 'Under Snow Conditions' is actually a slowed down fragment of distorted piano from 'She's Spinning', a track from the Ice album. The two extended tracks, 'Blue Rain Ships' and 'Grey Rain Ships', were constructed by running randomly overlapping tape loops from my archives, so there is an element of chance in these pieces.
The Shipyard is my first entirely instrumental album since Empty City. Like that previous album, the recordings continue to explore my fascination with man made structures interacting with their natural surroundings. The music has a strong sense of place and it recalls the atmospheres and landscapes I had hoped to capture so many years ago."
- Tor Lundvall, April 27th, 2012
Bonus tracks on the 2013 reissue:
"'The Shipyard in Winter' and another out-take entitled 'Safety in Grey' were originally released on the Tursa 2-CD compilation With Friends Like These... in 2010 (cross-faded into a single track). For the CD reissue, I separated the tracks and inserted them back into the running order where they originally belonged. I've also included one of my early 'In a Shipyard' demos recorded back in 1991."
- Tor Lundvall, September 12th, 2013
