Time Being - Hidden Structures (2024)

Hidden Structures, the fourth album from visionary electronic ambient duo Time Being, is a travelogue of the unknown. From a galaxy’s gossamer edge to the smallest subatomic particle, Hidden Structures captures, in nine epic visceral compositions, the wonder of the unseen and the astounding power of unanswerable questions.

Time Being is multi-instrumentalists Philip Wilkerson and Jourdan Laik. And Hidden Structures, like prior albums A Place to Belong, A Dimension Reflected and An Ocean of Time, shows their mastery at constructing intricate soundscapes: compositions that, like a slow zoom into a panorama, reveal more detail as they unfold.

But Hidden Structures also breaks new ground for these veteran artists. This album marks their first time using live percussion, brushes and shakers, which add new sensory layers to many of these pieces. As “Celestial Blueprint,” draws a galaxy with sound, bright shakers become spiral arms, a Hans Zimmer-esque drone the black hole at its center, and eerie piano the dark matter between them. On the hypnotic “Concealed Vertex,” a drone thunders behind a field recording of rain. Warm textures ebb and flow throughout, coalescing and dispersing like moonlight caught on raindrops, a thousand shards of glass.

To conjure the unknowable, Wilkerson and Laik also experimented with negative space on Hidden Structures, using silence to contrast their complex sonic architecture. These moments of quietude make “Uncertainty Unveiled” a masterclass in compression and release. Quivering brushes rise from a vacuum into a sonorous warble, the rumbling voice of the unknowable, then fade to quietude again. These small moments of vacancy highlight the impossible vastness of the universe and the vividness of Time Being’s soundscapes.

From quantum nano-worlds to the unmapped voids of intergalactic space, Hidden Structures guides the listener into unfamiliar spaces, and confronts throughout, the majesty of the unseen, the uncharted, and the unfathomable.