As a real swerve from the groove-propelled sound of his Trio and possibly slightly more in keeping with his work as part of Pelt, Seven Lefts is Nathan Bowles first completely solo album since 2016’s Whole & Cloven. Using ‘improvisations as a function of home recording’, Nathan set up a four-track tape recorder and armed himself with keyboards, banjo and tape samples, which he stitched together, manipulated, pulled apart, stripped back, etc., to create this mammoth, tangible album that is unlike anything he has done before.
And mammoth it is, hitting over seventy minutes, with Nathan seemingly happy to let the songs run to sixteen minutes in places, inviting deep listening. His use of a tape recorder and samples also gives the sound a lived-in, but also very solid and ‘real’ feel and texture; it’s something like comparing CGI effects with stop-motion on film; the fuzz and body to the sound give it considerable substance and grit. Nathan likens it in part to quicksand in his notes, which seems accurate.
Musically, the album is diverse and inventive, and the impression is that Nathan really dove in deep and made the record he was looking for, on his own terms. The mixture of drone sounds and muscular riffs, be it locked in or loose, is very well balanced, and it’s easy to become totally absorbed in the album. Take the opening track Left One; an underlying minimalist percussion loop with a fuzzy electronic drone note sits below a distorted piece of free-flowing banjo that swings from discordant to pleading and aware.
Left Three takes this approach and goes more cosmic, with what sounds like a guitar riff through effects being repeated and sliced up and repeated again at various tempos, resulting in something like a super-charged version of Nathan’s I Miss My Dog from Whole & Cloven. As a tonic, Left Four uses a background sound somewhere between flowing water and a breeze through leaves to frame a metallic, jangly keyboard part.
Moodier is Left Five, which uses manipulated banjo (there are echoes of Daniel Bachman’s more recent music here) to ramp up a rock-solid piece of long-form improvisation. The tape sound here, like the guitar on Liam Grant’s Prodigal Son, gives the banjo some heavy reverb, giving the notes real heft. It’s fantastic, exciting music that kept me completely hooked for over sixteen minutes.
On paper, this is a real challenge. Well over an hour of improvised, scuzzy sound and insistent, burly refrains would tempt the chin-scratchers, but this is a surprisingly listenable set. That’s not to say it’s easy; the desire to produce music that requires thought and concentration is successfully realised, but it’s enjoyable and addictive. As far a cry as you can get from the primitive, straight-up tunes of Nathan’s debut, A Bottle, A Buckeye, or anything in between, really, this splendid project demonstrates the range and ambition of this deep-thinking, meticulous musician. Boom.
Seven Lefts (February 6th, 2026) Self Released