The Equation of Time presents the guitar of Anthéne (Brad Deschamps) and the cello of Simon McCorry combined through processing and done so across a great distance. (Of course, for what collaboration wasn’t this the case during the pandemic?) The album’s six tracks let moments of brief ferocity and sharp detail peek out amid vast cumulus gatherings of shoegaze-rich cloud cover. Amid that ambient intensity, riffs can still be located, despite being buffeted by sonic winds. A gray mass reveals, for example, tiny little repetitive, keyboard-like cues toward the end of “Time Past,” the opening cut. On “Time Future,” the penultimate track, the audio processing is dialed back, especially where the cello in concerned, the plucking and sawing heard clearly amid cavernous echoes and artfully tortured extrapolations. “Drift of Stars” has a muted, compressed quality, the sound as if experienced from the other side of thick glass at first, before yielding something in higher resolution, waves of sounds overlapping, converging. The whole set — each track’s title apparently borrowed from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets — is beautiful from start to finish.
Album originally posted May 22, 2021, at whitelabrecs.bandcamp.com. More from Deschamps at twitter.com/braddeschamps and McCorry at simonmccorry.com.