There’s a moment in Will Samson’s "Songs of Beginning & Belonging" where the air feels thinner, like the weight of time itself has dissolved into the tape hiss. It might be in the drifting piano of "Loshult", or the barely-there plucked strings of "Still Trains", but it’s there - somewhere - a quiet, invisible threshold where Samson’s compositions stop being music and start feeling like a way of breathing.

This is an album that hums with a gentle defiance. Will Samson, a self-described outsider - too experimental for indie, too indie for experimental - has spent his career orbiting spaces that never quite claimed him. And yet, here he is, sculpting an album that isn’t about yearning for belonging but rather accepting a kind of weightless self-definition. These six instrumentals shimmer with a sense of quiet relief, as if after years of searching, Samson has realized that belonging isn’t something you seek - it’s something you carry within.

Recorded along the River Tejo in Almada, Portugal (where Samson shared a space with Casper Clausen of Efterklang), the album is woven with the analog warmth of his ever-present Uher 4200 tape machine, a trusted vessel for capturing sound in its most fragile, undistilled form. But this isn’t just a nostalgia trip into the romance of tape loops - there’s a deliberate, almost surgical precision to Samson’s process. The textures are soft but never indulgent, melodic but never overwrought. In the hands of a lesser artist, this kind of work might drift into formless ambience, but Samson keeps everything tethered to an internal pulse, however slow and contemplative it may be.

From the outset, "I Will Sing Again Soon" sets the tone, unfolding like a half-remembered hymn whispered through the circuitry of an old reel-to-reel. The album’s title suggests both renewal and connection, and there’s something deeply human about these pieces, even in their abstraction. "Faris And The Olive Buds" moves through layers of softly eroding white noise, while "For Now" closes the album with a hushed sense of arrival - like stepping onto dry land after years at sea.

For an album so intimately tied to personal history, it never demands its listener to follow a linear narrative. Instead, "Songs of Beginning & Belonging" offers a kind of sonic refuge, a space where uncertainty is met with acceptance and the search for home becomes something less about geography and more about feeling. It’s a work of quiet liberation, wrapped in static and sunlight, balancing just on the edge of song, before dissolving back into the ether.

Or maybe it’s just an album best listened to with your eyes closed and your heart slightly ajar. Either way, it’s one worth getting lost in.