Recorded in high summers and brutal winters in 2022 and 2023, Nightingale Floor’s debut album Five Stagings takes the listener through a quintet of spontaneously conjured and patiently crafted pieces for a quartet of musicians scattered across North-West England.

Manchester-based poet Lauren McLean provides voice and words, joined by cellist Josh Horsley of Preston duo Powders, Benjamin D. Duvall of Liverpool four-piece Ex-Easter Island Head on sound collages, strings and trombone, with Tombed Visions label head David McLean on saxophones, keyboards and Bass VI. Born from long form improvisation, Nightingale Floor use Lauren’s transportive poems as the focal point in a series of ‘staging's’: words, textures and musical gestures built up like the painted backdrops of a theatre stage, casting the bare interior of a Mancunian garage as a sequence of vivid dream-like tableaux. Text and voice illuminate these five pieces with evocations of interior life against wide open spaces, weather and water, the rural and the industrial, animals and talismans. Sonically, the music draws on 4th world experimentation, musique concrète, jazz and chamber music. Stark Northern gothic and languid tropical heat.

Five Stagings is a record imprinted with the weather it was recorded in: from a freezing, breath fogged winter session to blazing 34-degree summer heat. Music of stillness, secrecy and brooding tension, with the group's unhurried approach to mixing and arranging allowing each piece to bear its own distinct set of parameters, characters and atmosphere. Music as footprints crossing the mind’s imagined landscapes.