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Time Being — Hidden Structures
(Spotted Peccary SPM-9107, 2024, CD / DL)

by Peter Thelen, Published 2024-09-04

Hidden Structures Cover art

The duo Time Being first appeared around a dozen years ago, give or take, with their debut album A Dimension Reflected, on the Lotuspike label (a subsidiary of Spotted Peccary), and over the years have  produced several more, Hidden Structures being their fourth. The nine pieces herein concern themselves with the unknown and the unseen, from microscopic or even subatomic structures to those so expansive that they traverse galaxies. Time Being is the collaborative project of Jourdan Laik (production, compositions, samplers, analog and digital synthesizers, piano, percussion, electric guitar, field recordings, and vocals, plus artwork and photography) and Phillip Wilkerson (digital synthesizers). The textural qualities of their sonic fabric is at once both ambient and melodic, borne of subtleties and simplicity, while following dark paths through dense phenomena and opening out to bright colorful ribbons of light that shimmer around the listener. There is far more going on here than first meets the ear, as multiple layers of sound permeate every moment, sometimes exploding with density, and at other times retreating to near silence, revealing other layers below the surface heretofore unheard. This is a very long album, nearly a hundred five minutes total, with a couple of the tracks stretching well beyond the twenty minute mark, and several others between eight and eleven minutes, which is probably the reason it hasn’t been released on any physical medium. On two of the most expansive pieces “Galactic Tapestry” and “Concealed Vortex,” Laik goes it alone, as he does on opener “Unseen Foundations”; those lengthy pieces are playgrounds that the listener can easily get lost within, with microsubtleties making themselves known around every corner, and a gentle warmth wrapping around the listener like a blanket. While there are credits for percussion, it consists manly  of bells, woodblocks, rainsticks, brushes, and so on, with no real cadence on any kind, and while there are vocals on “Beyond the Observable,” they are spoken and effected and only appear briefly. All taken, Hidden Structures is an amazing tour-de-force that offers curiosity and interest to the discerning listener.

Filed under: New releases, 2024 releases

Related artist(s): Phillip Wilkerson, Time Being (2)

More info
http://time-being.bandcamp.com/album/hidden-structures

 

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