Loner Deluxe :: Sound Tracks

Sound Tracks runs to twenty-five minutes, three more than a three-inch CD holds, the format behind almost everything Rusted Rail has released in twenty years.

The mini-album came out on 6 November 2026 on Rusted Rail, digital only, catalogue number RR68. Loner Deluxe is Keith Wallace, the label’s founder, who wrote, played, recorded, mixed and produced it in his Galway living room. It is a follow-up to Living Room, released in August, and the label pitches it as the soundtrack to an imaginary road movie. The titles play along, from “2.14 a.m. August 29th” to “One Last Drink in the Departure Lounge”. The instruments are those of a room full of things: guitars and effects, a Stylophone, a Korg MS-20 Mini, singing bowls, melodica, banjo, drum machines, pitched amp feedback and found sounds. Cecilia Danell guests on vocals and made the cover with Wallace.

Rusted Rail started in Galway in 2006, but Wallace says it had been in his head since 1995, when he was working at Flirt FM, the city’s student radio station, which he went on to manage. It is a micro-label built on community: whoever can take photographs, design a sleeve, master a record or print lends a hand. The artists almost always record at home, and Wallace says he has never set foot in a studio. The house format is the three-inch CD in handmade sleeves, which holds about twenty-two minutes, and the label does not license its music to advertising, television or film. Songs of Green Pheasant, The Declining Winter, United Bible Studies, Music for Dead Birds and Brigid Mae Power have all passed through the catalogue.

“Mental Ohm” is an instrumental in which the ambient element arrives as a sense that what you are hearing is already a memory. Guitar arpeggios, drum machine and synths, and everything here is plugged in.

“Fog Lit Cave” bears the stamp of a certain avant-garde folk. Bass and drum machine give it its frame, with arpeggiated guitars and 1990s-tinted synths laid on top, and the melodies have a lineage too, passed down through prog, new wave and indie.

In “Dusk Chorus”, and on much of the record, the music hangs between domestic introspection and cosmic ambition, as if an experimental drive had found a pop form. The electronic pastoralism makes even the most abstract passages easy to follow.

Sound Tracks works best as proof that, in the label’s twentieth year, its method of living rooms and household objects holds up beyond the twenty-two minutes of the small disc. The journey ends with “One Last Drink in the Departure Lounge”, the longest track at five minutes twenty-six, a last drink before leaving, taken in a Galway living room.