Jeffrey Dean Foster’s That's All We Are began as film soundtrack commission, but it’s always reductive to view such work as totally clinical, and no matter the seeming objectivity, circumstance and environment invariably bleed into process. With time these little sequences, ethereal translucent vignettes, took on an (after)life of their own.

Composed and initially recorded for Angus MacLachlan’s 2017 movie Abundant Acreage Available in a time of transition and downsizing, they were created in a tiny space with the minutiae of life carrying on quite literally around him while he dug into memory and reflection. For patterns or exemplars he fetched up Neil Young's After the Gold Rush – in its spawning out of Dean Stockwell’s film script, Jack Nitzsche's One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest soundtrack, and Cliff Martinez’s work on The Knick.

Save for one shiny pop song briefly calling back his pair of career-defining solo albums Million Star Hotel and The Arrow it’s a set of instrumentals. Often sparse cinematic conjurings, where ghosts of screen or sound meet, they hint at both internal and external phenomena and seem connected to the already released ‘I’m Starting To Bleed’ written and recorded in response to the murder of George Floyd. 

The record begins ghostly with ‘Night’ sparse entrance; guitar, piano, then banjo morphing into tense strings. Covering much ground in its brief passage, conjuring childhood memories of Peter And The Wolf while hinting at an Appalachian take on Kate Bush’s ‘The Ninth Wave’. – Nick West / Bucketfull of Brains UK