I had just begun to write about this, and how it was reminding me of being buffeted by the bitter North Sea wind on a desperate part of the Scottish coast, when Monkeyman glanced over my shoulder and told me I was wrong. “It doesn’t sound like that at all”, I was informed. “It sounds like spaceships”. Not for the first time, I began to consider the possibility that the wrong member of this household does the writing. I’m starting to think that even the cat has some more useful thoughts on some of the stuff I play, given the expressive way she flounced out of the room when I put this on.

You see, having done some cursory internet research, I found that although Dave Fyans, aka Erstlaub, does hail from the stretch of coastline on I was imagining, the creation of I Am The Line Drawn In The Sand Between The Living And The Dead (the title alone makes me want to stand up and applaud) had been strongly influenced by his immersion in the work of Tarkovsky. And with hindsight – and maybe a little too much chianti it has to be said – you can so hear Solaris in this oh-so-sloooooowly unfolding meditation, with some of its themes (in particular loneliness and a sense of sheer alien “other-ness”) making themselves felt through a hallucinatory fog and biting cosmic wind. One key difference from the film is that this record was recorded in just one take. And, as I can’t quite picture Gordon Brown listening to this with notepad in hand, probably with less interference from the government.

This is Erstlaub’s second album for Highpoint Lowlife, after last year’s On Becoming An Island, and is further evidence of a blooming, droning talent. Listen to an excerpt and pick up a copy of from the HPLL website. It is all about spaceships, obviously.