Nightingale Floor: Five Stagings

As DIY culture continues to suffer at the hands of this new world and its leaders’ flagrant disregard for the arts, seemingly the only way for participants to continue their creative survival is by way of collaboration.

This decade has seen collaboration reach unprecedented levels, to the point where many of the decade’s finest releases have been from artists across different parts of the world trading ideas, either via the world wide web or by recording together in the same space.  

Nightingale Floor’s debut album, Five Stagings, is the latest and first exquisite collaboration of 2026. Spearheaded by Manchester-based poet, Lauren McLean and David McLean on saxophones, keyboards and bass VI, the pair are joined by cellist, Josh Horsley (Powders), and multi-instrumentalist, Benjamin D. Duvall, (best known for his exploits in Ex-Easter Island Head).

While this decade has seen Duvall experience his most fertile creative period as leader of the Liverpool experimentalists, the McLeans have also thrived across new ground in their own various guises, including Burn Into Sleep and Fire Nearby. The former’s excellent collaboration LP alongside Dream Skills (featuring David’s brother, Don), I Carried You For Years And The Deers Are Still Hungry, resulted in some of the best ideas committed to tape in 2025. (Subsequently, it featured in Sun 13’s Top 50 Albums of the year.)

Nightingale Floor isn’t the first time Duvall and David have crossed paths. Their creative worlds, entwining in 2021 via the deeply narcotic Embassy Nocturnes LP under their respective Aging (David) and Land Trance (Duvall) projects. And while the McLeans seemingly continue to unfurl new projects as year goes by, Nightingale Floor is another engrossing chapter in their story.  

Beginning with Horlsey’s rustic strings, The Copse and the Hunting Lodge sees Nightingale Floor placing their audience at the scene of the crime; the damp smell of the woods, almost filling your nostrils. Accompanied by Duvall’s sound collages that glint like a cat’s eyes in the moonlight, it’s this earthy bedding of sound for Lauren to move from silence into sound. Her words, like thunderbolts from a cloud (“You peel back a leaf / A prayer or a belief… The sound of brave willow trees travels further in cold air”).

Whichever the project, her performances continue to grow stronger, and on Plum Dark as David’s saxophone collides with Duvall’s storm-like sonics and trombone, Lauren’s words hit like something out of a fever dream (“Peace has come / Choose it over barbarism… I’ve seen the abyss and it’s plum dark”).

Lauren continues to drift in and out of these compositions like a spectre breaching the walls of a fourth world. On Meadow, 1928, she provides an opening line that probably won’t be bettered this year (“Kind people find drains in themselves hourly / Can I crawl into them?”) Like a Twin Peaks binge enhanced by chemical refreshments, backed by more rich sonic architecture of strings and drones, it’s Nightingale Floor at their most hypnotic.

Elsewhere, and Crystal Radio sees David’s bass rumble and Horlsey’s stratched strings stir with the kind of menace one would associate with Jakob sharing a recording space with Rachel’s. And this vastness continues on Lion to Feel. Chiming windscapes and urgent strings that sweep across the high seas, suddenly Nightingale Floor find themselves far from the dampness of The Copse in the Hunting Lodge in favour of some folkloric kingdom exclusive to world builders. Which is essentially what Nightingale Floor are.

In its own way, the contrast of Lion to Feel frames Five Stagings. Recorded in the winters and summers of 2022 and 2023, it underlines the patience of these carefully shaped compositions. Its practitioners, students of the process, and while the spontaneity that both Burn Into Sleep and Dream Skills explored during their own ascent made for compelling results, despite its different flight path, Nightingale Floor’s Five Stagings is every bit its equal. Purely evocative, and so layered, you can’t help but return for more.

Five Stagings is out now via Tombed Visions. Purchase from Bandcamp.