condition (cassete/cover): NM / NM 

Very rare first press, privately issued by Darren Tate in the early 90s on his Ora editions, this being OR5. It pre-dates Gnome, which pre-dates Nil, which pre-dates Fungal… it’s the origin of the myth. The version offered here is not even present on Discogs.  Like most of the project's output, Isle appeared in a small hand-assembled edition on the group's own house imprint and circulated via mail-order to the sliver of the UK drone underground that knew to ask for it.

The Ora method by this period had stabilised into something distinct from anything else in the contemporary experimental underground. Field recordings (often made in the South Yorkshire landscapes Tate documented obsessively), bowed metals, flutes, sitars, occasional saxophone from Lol Coxhill, and the patient electronic treatment only Potter could provide were layered into slow compositional arcs. The music declines the ambient contract that would let it recede into the background, staying audibly present but refusing event.

Scarce, private, typical of the Ora aesthetic of deliberately limited circulation. Much of the material from this period was later compiled on the Final (ICR, 2002) and After Rainfall CDs, but the original cassettes remain the documents Ora themselves intended, issued with the patience and the resistance-to-market that defined the whole project.