> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.hwaelmag.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # From A Harbour Softly Drawn :: Shepherds - URL: https://www.hwaelmag.com/from-a-harbour-softly-drawn-shepherds/ - Published: 2026-10-24T04:56:33.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-24T05:03:59.000Z - Description: Ambient jazz: a summer of attic sessions with friends, resampled years later. - Author: Hwael Mag - Tags: Album Reviews, 2026, Ambient, Field Recordings ### For eight years Fraser McGowan worked on recordings he could no longer attribute, though he knew everyone who had played on them. --- From A Harbour Softly Drawn is the new recording alias of Fraser McGowan, who used to record at home in Paisley as Caught In The Wake Forever. Alongside his own, the credits of *Shepherds*, released by Dronarivm on 23 October 2026, list three names with no instruments and no tracks attached: Colin Morrison, Darren Galloway, Andrew Woods. Seven years ago, on *Waypoints*, the same friends were all there: Morrison on classical guitar, Galloway on synth and drum machine, Woods among the thanks. According to the label, somewhere in the long years spent on those late-night sessions the memory of who played what wore away, and McGowan ended up resampling his friends the way you resample an archive. [Shepherds by From A Harbour Softly Drawn](https://dronarivm.bandcamp.com/album/shepherds?ref=hwaelmag.com) The sequence opens with the seven and a half minutes of “Morning Waters”, its title echoing the early-morning shoreline tapes. It sounds like an experimental jazz trio handed a stack of Orbital records and a sleeping pill each, and somehow finding in that drowsiness a patience the originals never had time for. “Yillen” follows, a minute and a half built on a classical guitar. On *Waypoints* that instrument belonged to Colin Morrison; it might still be his here, and the record gives no way of knowing. It is a record of real class, and the reason lies somewhere before the editing. A recording holds on to the whole moment it came from: whoever was playing, and also whoever in that attic was keeping quiet, listening, waiting for their turn. The pauses and the waiting belong to that night and to those people, and no amount of software, artificial intelligence included, could have supplied them afterwards. McGowan cut, moved and pasted material years old, and you can hear his hours at the computer. Still, the quality of *Shepherds* lies also, perhaps mostly, with the friends who played on those nights without knowing they’d become samples. “Seaweed” and “Rhu Aun” make this clearer than anything else here: fragments of field recording slip in between the played passages, and the shoreline and the attic, taped at different times, end up inside the same piece. The same two tracks bring nineties Ninja Tune to mind. It happens halfway through each, when a beat comes in that sounds as if it was added later, the piano lingers on held notes that suggest a late-night jazz club, and the synths widen the field. These are the most direct passages on the record, open, easy to live in at any hour, and made with the same care as the rest. “Feels Like Coming Home” is where the calm of the whole record becomes audible, the patience with which every loop, every session, every sound was put in its place. It’s easy to picture it in the attic, or near the shore, with someone sitting in a corner who isn’t playing and is there all the same. Everything seems to be happening now, though the recordings belong to another time. McGowan brings that summer back as he remembers it today, rearranging its sounds without quite losing the room around them. Eight years later, he lets the rest of us in. LISTENING NOTES / 01 01 02 03 "Yillen" One progression, the kind we used to tell each other as teenagers to play again because it sounded good. Above it, a voice with eastern inflections, sung that way or shaped by the sampler. "Lavender & Blue Thread" Piano and light brushwork keep a walking pace; a guitar traces a slow phrase out of nineties slowcore, perhaps the blue thread of the title. "Feels Like Coming Home" A looped arpeggio, soft and warm, changes slowly as samples, a violin and a thin electronic texture come in. *Shepherds* is dedicated, the label writes, to whatever guides you on your journey. The shepherds of the title, then, might be the friends from the attic, present on the record though their individual contributions can no longer be identified. Dronarivm also offers it as a double CD paired with a reissue of *The Places Where I Worship You* (2015). That album grew out of four days of recording on the Isle of Arran during a family holiday, and an old 78 bought in a charity shop at the ferry port. Two stretches of Scotland’s west coast, released eleven years apart. ---