Color of Time - Color of Time II (2024)

Past Inside the Present is proud to begin its summer slate with a new, full-length suite from Color of Time, the duo comprising label veterans Kévin Séry (aka From Overseas) and Nick Turner (aka Tyresta). Each artist is known for his own kind of spacious, heart-rending drone, and on II, they occupy a sonic universe in which melancholy themes linger over drifts of harmonic guitar and arrays of intricate detail. The delicacy of these environments results from a passion for organic textures, an unhurried and intuitive mixing process, and final touches from renowned mastering engineer Stephan Mathieu.

Turner describes Color of Time as “a vehicle for exploring shared concerns about the state of the world, particularly climate change,” an inspiration that appears with abundance in II’s powerful, but fragile, constructions. “Free For a Moment” opens with a twinkling of bells, as swelling bass and saintly voices wrap around a bustling core, summoning something benevolent and teeming with life. “While We Can” evokes the silvered calm of a lake amid overcast skies, with plucked strings creating ripples on its mirrored surface while muffled mystery billows beneath.

​Across the album, drawn bows lilt across the stereo field in patient melodic themes, offering more suggestion than statement. The duo’s remarkable restraint in their arrangements comes from a gentle evolution of each piece during production; Séry notes that several original versions were “more guitar driven and post-rock inspired”, but many of the concrete forms were reconfigured as they adopted a more nebulous vision through their naturalistic approach.

“When Will We Learn” earns its poignant title, echoing Stars of the Lid at their sweetest, with deep low-end, willowy drones and glassy resonances that bring to mind the quiet majesty of firefly constellations at dusk. Exemplary side two opener, “Something Better”, pairs yawning harmony with phosphorescent guitar picking across the backdrop, perhaps the most distinct highlighting of the two creators’ individual styles. Gradually, a gorgeous contralto vocal appears from the ether, aching to share some secret that exists outside language, before vanishing into soft-edged obscurity.

II’s thematic concern with the Anthropocene era courses through the veins of “Surrender”, where sustained strings and a roiling drone continuously build, while waves of lo-fi howls fight to break the surface until they are left in the open air for a brief, final moment. The sprawl of “All That Remains” ties together nearly every key element of the collection: undulating guitars, vaporous voices, saturated drone, tender static, and endless recombinations of elegant consonance.

Despite the heft of its inspirations, this closing statement is a reverent, gracious surrender to the forces beyond our control. Turner and Séry aptly describe a wish “to create a sense of empathy, compassion, and shared experience in the listener, rather than sending them into a spiral of despair and hopelessness – there is always light in the darkness, and that’s what we are trying to achieve.”