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Craig Tattersall

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The Humble Bee, “Morning Music” (Cotton Goods (2010)/Dauw (2025)

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Newly remastered and reissued for the first time ever, Morning Music was the second handmade release from Craig Tattersall’s solo tape music project. Notably, Tattersall had already been involved in several great bands by this stage (Hood, The Remote Viewer, The Boats), but the simple, intimate ambient soundscapes of The Humble Bee were a new direction for him and the original 4CD collection was a major statement that has deservedly acquired a cult following over the years through unofficial uploads. Notably, the album’s title is quite literal, as these pieces were all recorded over the course of a frigid Manchester January between 6am and 7am each day (before Tattersall left for work) and each piece needed to be fully composed, recorded, mixed, and documented within that one hour. 

Given that tight time constraint, these pieces are all understandably quite brief (two or three minutes each) and quite simple as well (usually just two or three interwoven loops). That brevity and simplicity seemed to suit Tattersall just fine, however, as these tender and sublime miniatures cumulatively add up to languorously beautiful and immersive extended reverie. Unsurprisingly, Tattersall’s palette was quite simple as well, as he wove his magic from little more than a few blearily frayed and murmuring chords, an occasional gently flickering fragment of melody, and a healthy amount of crackling, hissing, and fluttering tape noise. That last bit is unusually important, as it gives these delicate pieces a satisfying physicality in which they seem to be crackling with electricity and life. Those non-musical sounds also often play an integral role in shaping the hypnotic rhythm of these looping meditations.  

In keeping with the theme of meditation, the essential beauty of these pieces lies in the Zen-like harmony of Tattersall’s combined loops, as he proves himself to be quite adept at finding the ideal balancing element for each of his central themes. For example, the gentle murmuring ambiance of “06.01.2010” unexpectedly blossoms into deep, languorous beauty around the halfway point when a warm, repeating bass tone and wobbly two-note melody appear. Elsewhere, “17.01.2010” is another highlight, as a sensuous and whistling melody resembling a singing saw gradually emerges from a cold rumble. I was also struck by a back-to-back pair of lovely piano pieces on the album’s second half (“19.01.2010” & “20.01.2010”), as twinkling and rippling melodies lazily circle over a backdrop of warm, wistful chords.

That said, the individual highlights are far less important than the overall experience, as Morning Music feels like a blissful morning spent in a cozy cabin with a crackling fire and manages to sustain that heavenly illusion for the duration of two full LPs. Actually, scratch that: it actually feels more like a warm memory of such a morning, as the warped, stretched, flickering, and submerged textures of the tape loops imbue these pieces with a dream-like sense of unreality that is an extremely alluring place to linger. In fact, I can think of few albums more deserving of a reissue than this one, so Dauw deserves a lot of credit for finally coaxing Tattersall into making that a reality. I especially envy the people who managed to snag the original hand-assembled Cotton Goods release with the daily photographs from Tattersall’s window and the diagrams of his set-up, as Morning Music is an absolute classic of intimate and soulful home-recorded magic.  

Listen here.

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The Humble Bee, “Light Trespassing” (Motion Ward, 2022)

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I have a long-running fondness for tape loop artists, yet I had always lumped this Craig Tattersall project together with more conventional ambient fare until last year’s reissue of 2009’s A Miscellany For The Quiet Hours finally smacked me in the head and made me pay closer attention. I bring that up because Light Trespassing (recorded roughly a decade later) entered heavy rotation in my life immediately after my Quiet Hours obsession and it has been quite interesting to hear how Tattersall’s vision has subtly transformed over the ensuing decade. In some ways, it feels like the two albums could have been recorded in the same damn week, but it is also clear that Tattersall has been consciously chasing an even more minimal and lowercase vision than the one he started off with. 

That tendency makes Light Trespassing a bit less immediately gratifying than some other Humble Bee releases, but I suspect that may very well be the point. In fact, Tattersall’s execution remains as mesmerizing as ever—he is simply achieving the same ends with an increasingly reduced palette and even fewer moving parts. In essence, all that truly changed is that I now need to listen a bit more attentively before Tattersall’s delicate miniatures reveal their full beauty. It feels akin to witnessing a tightrope walker systemically removing all safety measures as they become more confident in their ability to consistently nail their signature tricks without even the hint of a wobble.

In keeping with the theme of extreme minimalism, Tattersall and Motion Ward have provided very little background information about this release other than the poetic phrase “like the last embers of a fire burning.” As far as album descriptions go, however, that is quite an admirably apt and concise summary (though it does demand some familiarity with Tattersall’s previous tape work in order to grasp the full implications). To my ears, it feels like Tattersall decided to expand the ephemeral beauty of the fading final moments of his usual fare (the point where all the added layers fall away to reveal the naked, beating heart of a piece) into an entire album of such “last embers.”

The first few pieces provide an especially lovely introduction to the possibilities opened up by such an approach. In “A Little Alone Snow,” for example, it seems like two harp loops of slightly different lengths create an endlessly transforming melody as their moment of collision keeps subtly changing. Elsewhere, “However Far I Walk” initially sounds like little more than a simple arpeggio fragment played on an acoustic guitar, but then a new loop begins dancing through the spaces between those notes to form a tender melody. Tape noise, recorder clicks, hiss, and room tone also play a larger role than usual on this album, particularly on “When Your Voice Disappears.”

My favorite pieces on the album tend to be the more fleshed out gems that begin surfacing near the midpoint though (“A Day of Light and Air,” “Inside Out Mountains,” and “Dotted and Course With”). They each have their own unique character, of course, but they all evoke a similarly elusive and ineffably beautiful scene akin to a half-blissful/half-ghostly dream in which I am waiting outside a train station on a perfect spring day awaiting a long lost love. 

Those are not the only quietly gorgeous pieces to be found, however, as Light Trespassing has quite a satisfying arc of deepening warmth and soft-focus dreaminess. If there is a caveat with this album, it is merely that it takes a few listens for the full beauty of its sublime spell to sink in, but I certainly got there eventually. In fact, I wish I could dissolve myself into this album. I have not figured out how to do that yet, unfortunately, so I will try to content myself by merely stating that Light Trespassing adds yet another singularly beautiful album to Tattersall’s rich and varied discography.

Samples can be found here.

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The Humble Bee, “A Miscellany for the Quiet Hours” (Cotton Goods (2009)/Astral Industries (2021))

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It admittedly took me a while to finally connect all the dots in my head, but it dawned on me recently that The Boats were kind of the Throbbing Gristle of a hard-to-define strain of ambient-adjacent bittersweet melancholia. My case: both Andrew Hargreaves and/or Craig Tattersall have been consistently involved in a host of varied and wonderful projects for more than two decades now (Hood, The Remote Viewer, Tape Loop Orchestra, etc.). 

The tape loop-focused The Humble Bee is Tattersall’s most prolific and consistent endeavor, as he has been steadily releasing solo work and collaborations under that moniker since 2009. In fact, this album was the project’s debut, but I only recently heard it for the first time, as its initial release was a limited CDr in a handmade case made from repurposed book covers (pictured). Last month, it got a well-deserved reissue on vinyl from the endearingly eccentric Astral Industries with VERY different cover art and it sold out instantly. That gives me hope for humanity, as this incredibly beautiful and absolutely sublime release deserves as much exposure as it can get. A Miscellany for the Quiet Hours is a stone-cold classic.

Given the literary/antiquarian bent of the original packaging, “The Bedside Book” fittingly opens the album on a note of dreamily flickering, sepia-toned wistfulness. It conjures an understatedly gorgeous pile-up of frayed, overlapping, and gently crackling antique music box loops. The hits just keep coming from there, as Tattersall ingeniously weaves sparse melodic fragments into richly textured and sometimes achingly beautiful collages that feel like the work of an enchanted Victrola. 

I realize that the magic of this album is simply “Craig Tattersall has a great ear for loops and is extremely skilled at collaging them in interesting, soulful ways.” However, it is still a genuinely surprising and improbable convergence of different threads. It sometimes seems like Mary Lattimore recorded source material for Everyone Alive Wants Answers-era Colleen, but then Philip Jeck cannibalized their album and teamed up with a jazz guy for an impressionistic and understated accompaniment to a night of classic silent film. In less convoluted terms, that means that Tattersall uses a lot of simple, but lovely harp-like melodies that pop, crackle, and warble in pleasantly languorous fashion, but sometimes a double bass or a trumpet will steer things in a more sensual or noir direction. 

The album highlight is probably “Technical Press,” which punches up Tattersall’s already beautiful vision with a cool bass loop and plenty of wobbly and warped psychedelic flourishes. Elsewhere, “With Answers” makes similarly effective use of backwards sounds, but in more throbbing, ambient-minded fashion, while the closing “P209” feels like a killer dub techno classic that’s been frayed and hiss-ravaged into something a bit more hypnagogic. While those four pieces are currently my favorites, competition is unusually fierce, as Tattersall’s instincts are absolutely unerring on this album.

Samples can be found here.