Bleep

Since the beginning of the 2020s, clocolan has been travelling ever more inward. From the grand psycho-technological narrative of Empathy Alpha to the uncertain midpoint between human and machine on Incide, even if verging on dystopian there was an excitement to their kinetic microbeats and vintage synth passages, the thrill of living in the age of sci fi action. On his latest record, all that gets washed away: When the Emptying Sun Filled the Sky is one of clocolan’s most internal and minimally expressed transmissions.

This is saudade for the end times. Patiently staking out on emotional territory, these tracks gradually drift across their dusty compositions. Slow music box plunks dance through the opening ‘Do You Feel Different Now’, negative space filled with whooshing air. In billions of years, the Sun will exhaust its fuel supplies, brighten, and expand until the Earth is completely consumed; the blurry vocal samples on this album contemplate it all in desertlike atmospheres with nothing left to lose.

While the occasional rhythmic component appears on tracks like ‘Not Long Now’ with a slow and gentle thud accompanying glossy tangles of notes, or the ebbing and flowing shuffle of the title track, this is a largely beatless affair. A camera slowly focusses on the sunbleached melodies of ‘Wake Toward Me’, expansive and cathartic with its retro synthesis, highlighting the album’s tendency towards bittersweet swells.

In unhurried solitude, clocolan paints contemplative sonic pictures on When the Emptying Sun Filled the Sky.