Russ B The Lonely Bell
(2025)
In the realm of dark ambient and drone music, where time dilates and silence speaks volumes, few works demand the kind of complete surrender that The Lonely Bell’s Found Footage requires. This isn’t an album in the conventional sense it’s a singular, unbroken 35-minute descent into the profound isolation and haunting beauty of Scotland’s windswept northern edge. Released in 2021, this self-released work stands as one of Ali Murray’s most austere and challenging compositions under his Lonely Bell moniker, predating his more widely recognized releases like Kingdoms of the Deep and The Absent Years.
An Artist Shaped by Isolation
To understand Found Footage, one must first understand its creator. Ali Murray is a Scottish-Filipino musician who has spent his entire life on the Isle of Lewis, a remote island in the Outer Hebrides off the northern coast of Scotland. This isn’t mere biographical detail it’s the very essence of The Lonely Bell’s sonic identity. The Isle of Lewis is a place of standing stones and Norse ruins, of iron age structures peppering a landscape battered by Atlantic winds and perpetual rain. It’s a location steeped in history and mystery, where the elements themselves seem to compose the soundtrack of daily existence.
Murray creates music under two distinct identities: his own name for songwriter-oriented material incorporating folk and indie influences, and The Lonely Bell for what he describes as “dark introspective ambient music from a cold little Scottish island”. While his Ali Murray releases feature vocals and traditional song structures, The Lonely Bell strips away all conventional markers, leaving only texture, atmosphere, and the raw emotional residue of living in one of Britain’s most geographically isolated communities.
Since establishing The Lonely Bell project around 2015 with his self-titled debut, Murray has built a formidable catalog of releases exploring themes of desolation, memory, oceanic depths, and the psychological landscapes of solitude. His work has appeared on respected labels including Shady Ridge Records, Blackjack Illuminist Records, Somnimage, and Oscarson, establishing him as a distinctive voice within the dark ambient and drone communities.
The Structure of Emptiness
Found Footage presents itself as a single, continuous 35-minute track no movements, no chapters, no reprieve. This structural choice is significant. Where Murray’s later works like Kingdoms of the Deep and Ghost Town Burning offer thematic variation across multiple compositions, Found Footage commits fully to a singular vision, asking listeners to immerse themselves completely or not at all.
The title itself invites interpretation. “Found footage” typically refers to film or video discovered after the fact, often implying something lost, abandoned, or fragmentary. In this context, Murray seems to suggest sonic archaeology sounds retrieved from memory, landscape recordings captured and preserved, or perhaps the emotional artifacts of lived experience on Lewis translated into tones and drones. There’s an inherent melancholy in the concept of “found” material, as if these sounds were waiting to be discovered, lying dormant in the peat bogs and coastal caves of Murray’s island home.
Sonic Characteristics and Composition
While specific track-by-track analysis is impossible given the work’s unified structure, Murray’s approach to sound design on Found Footage draws from his established palette. Based on his documented creative process and the broader Lonely Bell catalog, the piece likely incorporates manipulated field recordings from the Isle of Lewis environment wind, water, the ambient sounds of rural isolation combined with heavily processed guitars, synths, and drones.
Murray has described his compositional approach as blending ambient and drone with elements of modern classical, shoegaze, electronica, and sound art. Reviewers of his work consistently note the aquatic quality of his sound, the sensation of hearing the world from beneath a water’s surface. This makes particular sense given his island location, where the sea is never far away and crossing water becomes a necessary ritual to reach the mainland.
The music operates on what one reviewer called “the slow drift” constantly moving but at such a gradual pace that change becomes almost imperceptible. It’s music that “slows down time,” creating a suspended state where the listener becomes unmoored from normal temporal experience. The deep, immersive quality suggests Murray’s methodology of treating and re-treating sounds, building layers of processed audio in a manner reminiscent of early Thomas Köner, creating music that’s less about melody or rhythm and more about texture and spatial awareness.
Context Within The Lonely Bell’s Evolution
Found Footage arrives relatively early in Murray’s discography as The Lonely Bell, appearing after his self-titled debut (2015) and Waking Fields (2015), but before the more conceptually developed works that would follow. In many ways, it represents Murray finding his voice in the most minimal format possible one extended composition that refuses compromise or accessibility.
Compared to later releases, Found Footage stands as perhaps his most uncompromising work. Kingdoms of the Deep (2022) offered a narrative arc a deep sea concept album chronicling a tragedy at sea and exploring oceanic vastness as metaphor for personal depths. Ghost Town Burning (2023) featured two twenty-minute pieces that, while expansive, still provided structural variation. The Absent Years (2024) incorporated piano, guitar fragments, and more melodic elements into its seven-track framework.
Found Footage, by contrast, offers no such concessions. It’s a single statement, extended meditation, or perhaps more accurately, a portal into a very specific psychological and geographical space.
The Aesthetics of Desolation
What makes The Lonely Bell’s work so compelling and Found Footage specifically is Murray’s ability to transform isolation into something simultaneously comforting and unsettling. Multiple reviewers note the “beautiful desolation” of his music, the way darkness and warmth coexist in his soundscapes. There’s something paradoxical about finding solace in sounds that evoke emptiness, yet Murray’s music consistently achieves this balance.
The influence of Murray’s environment cannot be overstated. The Isle of Lewis experiences harsh weather conditions cold, wet, blustery days that define much of the year. The landscape is one of moorland and coast, of ancient stone circles and abandoned structures, of communities separated by vast stretches of uninhabited terrain. This physical reality permeates The Lonely Bell’s aesthetic, creating what one writer called “moorland melancholy”.
Yet there’s also a sense of time and space that Murray captures—the feeling of having “a lot of time and space to play with,” as one reviewer observed. Living in such isolation provides something rare in contemporary life: genuine solitude for deep creative work, uninterrupted by the noise of urban existence. This quality of sustained, patient attention manifests in the music’s unhurried unfurling.
Reception and Legacy
While Found Footage hasn’t received the same level of critical attention as Murray’s later, more accessible works, it remains available on Bandcamp and has appeared on Spotify, suggesting a dedicated if niche audience. For listeners drawn to the furthest reaches of ambient and drone those who appreciate artists like Stars of the Lid, Tim Hecker, Rafael Anton Irisarri, or the aforementioned Thomas Köner Found Footage offers a rewarding if demanding experience.
The work’s single-track format places it in conversation with other extended drone pieces in the genre’s history, from La Monte Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music to more recent works by artists like Sarah Davachi and Eliane Radigue. It’s music designed for deep listening, for meditation, or for creating a specific environmental mood that transforms the space around it.
Listening Recommendations
Found Footage is not background music. It requires intention ideally experienced through quality headphones or speakers in a quiet environment where its subtle shifts and deep frequencies can be fully appreciated. This is music for late nights, for contemplative mornings, for moments when the world outside feels too loud and chaotic.
Those new to The Lonely Bell might find more accessible entry points in Kingdoms of the Deep or The Absent Years, both of which offer more structural variation and melodic elements while maintaining Murray’s distinctive atmosphere. But for those willing to commit to Found Footage‘s singular vision, the rewards are substantial a chance to experience one artist’s unflinching translation of profound geographical and psychological isolation into sound.
Conclusion
Found Footage stands as a testament to the power of constraint and commitment in ambient music. By limiting himself to a single, unbroken composition, Ali Murray created something that resists easy consumption while offering deep rewards to patient listeners. It’s a work that captures the essence of The Lonely Bell project—the transformation of isolation, whether chosen or circumstantial, into something approaching transcendence.
In an era of algorithmic playlists and scattered attention, Found Footage demands the opposite: complete presence, sustained focus, and a willingness to sit with discomfort and beauty in equal measure. For those seeking music that doesn’t merely accompany life but creates its own distinct temporal and spatial reality, this 35-minute journey into the heart of Scotland’s most remote landscapes offers exactly that. It’s music that understands silence, desolation, and solitude not as absences but as presences rich, complex, and worthy of deep exploration.
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