Robinson's Village – Happy Birthday, Mate
Happy Birthday, Mate
Robinson's Village
Album
Ambient
Andrea Portou
December 15, 2025
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Over the past few years, James Burns has built a sizable following through his alias Robinson’s Village, where he frequently posts daily tape loops, modular synth jams, and other audio hardware experiments.
Burns has curated a world predicated on sonic destruction, where tape is melted, burnt, buried underground for weeks, cut up, reversed, sampled, and otherwise transformed beyond recognition. The result is rich sonic journeys cooped into a brief length. It’s a short-form, lo-fi style of ambient, drenched in reverb, bearing the same cadence as Grouper or Tim Hecker.
On his latest release though, Happy Birthday, Mate, Robinson’s Village has turned his process-oriented music into a meaningful wintery album. These lush soundscapes are the most concrete demonstration of why his work has resonated with so many online. Some listeners may find bliss and reflection here, while others may view its murkiness and liminality as melancholic. It’s the textural equivalent of rubbing ice on a scorched tongue, equal parts meditative and gritty, ambient music that demands to be at the forefront.
Recorded during the holiday period at the end of 2024 and on a Tascam 4-track and an OP-1 synth, Happy Birthday, Mate is a stark and honest time capsule into how transitory moments and sonic constraints coalesce. It’s an opportune choice to release these tracks a year later during the lead-up to Christmas, a chance for us to peer into the vault and see how this release has been caught in the year as though it were a tape loop.
The album’s tracks often build momentum through woozy pitch oscillation and sample glitches. Washington ebbs and flows between string-pad chords that fall like sheet rain and jittering synth leads, slowly building and reinforcing each layer until a sudden fade out. Other tracks like Respectable Citizen and Fun’s Over build motifs around the physicality of using the hardware, jumping between staccato and legato phrases.
Similar to the works of William Basinski, Burns’s music is a celebration of sonic accidents, such as tape hiss, audible clicks between samples, resonant frequencies jutting out of the mix, and grainy tape degradation. It’s no wonder Robinson’s Village has found a community of fans on TikTok, who frequently pair his music with visuals of snowy landscapes and melancholic phrases. His comment sections oscillate between analogue synth worship and discussions on the music’s evocations of memory, decay and isolation.
And yet, something more is stirring on Happy Birthday, Mate, a sense of cohesion that binds these tracks together. The lengthier tracks, such as A Stunning Portrait and the album’s title track, are a testament to the release’s preciousness and patience. The mere fact that this release can be purchased on cassette speaks to the project’s intentionality. As rewarding as this artist’s social media output is – a documentation of his evolving craft and expertise with analogue hardware – you won’t find moments like this while scrolling.
This album instead feels more personal, a window into the music made in between. This holiday season, in the unmoving, eerily quiet passages between festivities, give this precious release a listen.
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