A pervasive social critique of the last, oh I suppose, ten years or so at least, is the increasing lack of what one might call “presence”. If you’ve been to a live music performance in the last decade you’ve probably faced a sea of screens in front of you. Vaguely touristic location? Phones out, selfies, Instagram-husbands. Nice restaurant? Taking photos of each plate of food.

It’s more than just capturing something for posterity, there’s all sorts of layers of posturing entwined in a landscape dominated by social media. Indeed, as a hobbyist photographer it’s a difficult line I find myself treading being out with a camera, one of wanting to capture the moment whilst also respecting it and feeling a part of it as it passes.

One could even say it goes deeper than that, with people increasingly lost to doomscrolling whatever apps, or caught inside noise cancelling headphones. Part of a world perhaps, a virtual one, or a content microcosm entirely designed for them, but not an existence we might consider to be engaged in the real world. I digress. Or not.

I don’t wish to tell Ned’s story here on his behalf, but it’s one of parental loss too early in life’s journey and the cognisance of moving through parenthood in the face of such absence. Consequently there’s a deeply reflective and personal vision of his world spun here, its moments, and his part and presence within them with his son. It’s cliched to talk about “living in the moment” but that is what’s on display here, removed from digitisation and content sharing, just unobtrusive participation side-by-side from some nows and whens.

The music itself is reminiscent of other efforts on Florabelle: postcard ambient, not to coin a reductive microgenre term. But it is filled with distinct and discrete slices of life not so much found, but rather done and felt. Snippets of skateboard wheel noise on “Rainbow Rubberneckers”, snatches of playful laughter in “Rolling a Drum Down A Hill” and seaside water shenanigans in “Isn’t It Something”; even some archival excavations of Ned’s own father’s voice in “A Moment With My Dad (An Abstraction To My Son)”.

Much of this finds itself set to a backdrop of various field recordings also, emplacing and contextualising all these little personal moments into a wider environment. The gentle white noise of rain spattering the windshield in “We Need Groceries”, the more aquatic slosh and churn of breaking beach waves, a brush sweeping stone in some other domestic corner of “oh nice, a postcard from andrew”. Gentle instrumentation accompanies this all in guitar and lapsteel and piano, a subtle musical lattice helpfully woven with assistance from other artists such as M.Sage and Zander Raymond in service of the delicate atmospheres in the here and nows that were. It teeters perilously on the edge of the banal at points, but this too is part of existence and there is a pleasant calm and comfort in the familiar, even dull, rhythms of life.

I’m not a father so I can’t relate precisely with Ned’s parental experiences, but I have a young nephew and so appreciate the immediacy in those moments with him. One feels that the world shrinks in a way, down to their size and scope, and without the paraphernalia or baggage of the digital one, whilst also expanding in its whimsy and innocence and newness. I think when we’re around him we try, perhaps even without doing it consciously, to engage on his terms, and in doing so embrace the openness of the present.

I think we could all do with being more “here” for those around us, irrespective of age or context.