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Hi-res album artwork – House on the Hill artwork – Your Phantom Limb artwork

Rob St. John – Your Phantom Limb by Song, by Toad

Ian Humberstone – House On The Hill by Song, by Toad

The House on the Hill / Your Phantom Limb 7″ split single, released on 10th October 2011 by Song, by Toad records of Edinburgh, Scotland, marks the first object produced by a creative friendship spanning many years between Humberstone and St. John.  Recorded by Humberstone to half inch tape on a whirring old Tascam reel-to-reel recorder over the course of a handful of fog-strewn days in a frozen Cambridge kitchen in winter 2010, the songs share a somnambulant analogue glow, splitting into pop hooks hidden under well-wrapped layers of warm instrumentation.

This recording is the document of the heavy winter, the cold, cloistered kitchen, and the array of available instruments.   St. John was close to getting carried away with the heavy dub possibilities offered by a tape-delay unit; Humberstone resurrected a once-learnt childhood clarinet. A phantom limb is the sensation that an amputated or missing limb is still attached to the body and is moving appropriately with other body parts.  Your Phantom Limb is a haunted thing: a hymn that spectral sinners stop to sing.

This is Ian Humberstone‘s first release under his own name. Between 2005 and 2009 Ian released three records as Tissø Lake and toured the U.K. and North America under that name, playing DIY shows in basements, houses, scout huts and churches.

Whilst Tissø Lake featured a rotating band of musicians who floated in and out of both live shows and recordings, this first solo outing is a pared down affair supplemented by the sweeping violin of Malcolm Benzie (Eagleowl, Woodpigeon). The House on the Hill is an abandoned farmstead in Exeter (head north out of the city centre on Stoke Hill, take the first bridleway on the left and follow the path through the trees).