With Health & Safety, the newly minted LEFT imprint – the reissue‑, retrospective‑ and outlier‑focused anagram sibling of FELT – opens its catalogue by pulling a singular tape out of the shadows and onto vinyl. Originally issued in 2016 on Copenhagen’s Posh Isolation in a small cassette run, Health & Safety was the first solo statement from Danish guitarist Johan Surrballe Wieth, best known as a founding member of Iceage. Stripped of band, volume and rock song structures, he turns inward here, re‑casting his sensibility in a modern‑classical register that feels more like a series of interior rooms than a collection of tracks.

Conceived as a composer’s meditation on anxiety, depression, insomnia and all the damned tangles that come with them, Health & Safety moves across its 25 minutes with a kind of careful, haunted deliberation. Wieth trades distorted guitars for dour, measured piano figures that feel half like motifs, half like someone testing the weight of each chord before committing to the next. Around and beneath these keys, he threads mangled drone effects, almost subliminal violin scrapes, erratic chimes and whistles that seem to flicker in and out of the stereo field. The pacing has the uncanny logic of a guiding hand: you never quite know where you’re going, but the music seems to know exactly how long to linger in each mood before shifting the light.

Track titles and references hint at pharmaceuticals and coping mechanisms, but one of the album’s strengths lies in how it resists literal illustration. Whether or not each piece maps directly onto a drug, the overall atmosphere is that of a quiet fever dream where boundaries blur. Movements bleed into each other, drones from one section staining the next, small melodic gestures reappearing in altered, half‑remembered form. The tape’s original side‑length structure encouraged this sense of continuity, and the vinyl version preserves that flow: rather than discrete “songs”, Health & Safety feels like moving through a single, long corridor of thought, with doors opening briefly on different shades of unease and fragile calm.

Wieth himself has warned about the dangers of over‑listening when you’re in the middle of making an album – “You should be very careful listening to too much music when you're writing an album. It has a tendency to become a little too explicit” – and that caution seems to have shaped the tape’s introspective tilt. This is music that folds in on itself rather than outwardly signalling influence; whatever echoes of ambient, minimalism or tape‑damaged classical you might hear are filtered through a fiercely personal, deliberately under‑stated lens. It’s as if he’s trying to write around, rather than directly about, the states he invokes, leaving gaps and smudges for the listener’s own experience to seep into.

For this first‑ever vinyl edition, LEFT presents Health & Safety with a layout and design by Fergus Jones, drawing on Loke Rahbek’s original visual language for the 2016 cassette. The audio has been newly mastered by Miles Whittaker, sharpening detail while preserving the soft‑focus grain that is integral to the work’s mood. As the inaugural release on a sub‑label dedicated to reissues, retrospectives and oddball material adjacent to but not of FELT’s core, it offers a fitting manifesto: a small, deeply individual statement rescued from the tape underground and given the space to be heard as an album in its own right, a document of a musician learning how to sit, unflinchingly, inside his own head.