Huron – The Blue Tape
4.18.18 by Ryan Masteller

It’s not often I get thanked in liner notes, and in fact I can’t think of a single time it’s happened before. But sure enough, Philly ambient artist Johnny Lancia, aka Huron, has seen fit to shout out yours truly right on the tape’s lovely, evocative Jcard. Maybe it’s the somewhere-in-suburban-Pennsylvania twilight depicted, or maybe it’s the subdued and twilit soundscapes emanating from Huron’s “The Blue Tape,” but there’s something just so personal and directed about “Thanks to everyone who listened” that gets me right in the spot where all my emotions reside. Feel me?

OK, har har, but let these carefully curated washes of treated sound crest and break over you for a minute and see how you feel. “The Blue Tape” is perfectly colored, dense with melancholy and meaning, and almost the exact thing you need at the close of the day, any day, any season, whether you’re an office jockey staring out through an urban jungle or a landlocked sea captain wishing just one last time to feel the wind at your back as you man the tiller (though preferably not with something like this bearing down on you). There’s just a moon-on-the-water vibe about Huron, about “The Blue Tape” that starts the old emotional juices flowing again, and I can’t help but think that I missed my calling somehow. I should have learned to skipper a boat; I should have been married to the sea. (Apologies to my wife, obviously.)

I admit it, I totally stopped thinking about the office jockey as soon as I started making sea captain references – sorry. It’s that patented Huron song cycle, that ebb and flow of liquid longing. Apparently it does it to me every time.

“The Blue Tape” comes in an edition of 50, direct from Huron himself. Philly style.