Tracey Thorn
A Distant Shore

Beyond our chaotic urban grids, the queues at checkouts, the congestion in traffic, and the chronic lack of parking, there are places of simple everyday life, inhabited by simple people, where time is stretched to the point of blending with infinity.

Hull, for example, is drenched for most of the year by a steel sky, heavy with rain and enveloped in a silence so reverent that you can hear the rustle of clothes and the weight of life through the creaking of wooden boards poorly fastened to the floor.

Hull is deep gray, fishing boats in the harbor, coat racks adorned with damp parkas, light bulbs lit at noon, and wind that cuts the face.

Hull is suburb triumphing over the metropolis four to zero, it's a furniture store that will casually become famous.

Hull is predominantly rain, slow, violent, relentless, incessant rain.

Hull is Tracey, wet soles, and a thick fringe that completely hides one eye.

It is a "distant shore" that smells of a happy oasis, an intimate bedroom low-fi, it's the place you can't detach from even though you betray it every night.

It is a Small Town Girl between maturity and adolescence, locked away in the boxes up in the attic.

Hull is vulnerability, fears, discovery, change, wrapped around twenty minutes of tape.

Hull is an intimate album, a secret diary that smells of rain and speaks of Tracey.

It speaks of us.