A melancholy and evocative single piece, Hollow Land is the result of an isolated rural session convened by duo Trace Monument (Daniel Elms and Adam Blyth). Blyth handles guitar duties for crushing, transcendental doom merchants Blind Monarch, while Elms has produced music for a number of high-profile games and films, not least Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu. Both musicians have known each other for years, growing up in Hull and sharing a love of the post-industrial spaces of West Yorkshire.
The “unromantic ruins” of disappeared industries shadow Hollow Land, which, in true edgeland spirit, feels as connected to stone-walled Domesday fields and windswept moors as it does to towering, shuttered seed mills. Shimmering somewhere between the more reflective moments of Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Bell Witch, the album makes for a haunting, immersive listen.
With ‘Hollow Land’, Elms and Blyth wander through these visual contradictions. It is programmatic music that manifests an autofictional Yorkshire; a wilderness superimposed upon by magical realism. This becomes a metaphor for their collaboration: a map drawn by two players who explore the unknown terrain between their individual musical languages.
The result is a work that is deliberate, primordial, yet pastoral; a meditation on friendship, distance, and return. ‘Hollow Land’ is a record of two artists finding their shared territory; a landscape marked by sound, memory, and play.
— George Clift, Shadow World, 2025
You can purchase this piece of music on the internet in digital (boo) and cassette (double boo) formats.
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