5 out of 5

Label: SFI Industries

Produced by: Will Killingsworth (mixed and mastered by)

A gorgeous expansion of the Meridian Arc “sound,” which has already been evolving and mutating along some arcing axis of synthwave and noise and minimalism. Motivated by what sounds like a rather impactful personal event, Andrew Crenshaw (aka Meridian Arc) molds the seven tracks of Continuum into a pathing fitting of that album title: instead of a journey, this is an exploratory loop. It breathes: electronic exhales and ambient inhales.

The demarcation of tracks, though the material is sequenced as one listen, matters: while the shifts are not massive, they are there, and become more present as seconds tick by. The track names are also quite indicative of the listening experience; they call to mind feelings of memories collapsing, feelings just out of reach – the music, fittingly, buzzes and hums with ideas that tickle just the fringes of a track, giving you shivers of something joyous, or wholly frightening, before being subsumed by ebbing and flowing waves of static.

Gorgeous, puzzling artwork arguably doesn’t fit these thems, depicting strange, surreal structures in the sky; an odd figure on the back. But at the same time, these function as blasts or glimpses from / of an otherworld – part of the continuum of thoughts your brain is trying to process as it moves its housing body through this murky world.

Or somesuch. In short: with a fair amount of drone / noise in general and from Meridian Arc in my collection, it’s rare to run across something in this genre that so effectively straddles a line of feeling very defined – I am held within clear borders Crenshaw has constructed – and also so open-ended, without the material needing a start-to-finish narrative. Like I doubt I could tell you more than A-side or B-side for this (a thought on that in a second), but each moment feels distinct, and necessary to the entire sequence.

The second later thought on the vinyl split: you might’ve noticed I mentioned this is sequenced as one listen, which is the case if you’re going digital. It’s maybe worth checking out both formats: I don’t think the vinyl does a disservice where it splits the music, nor does it feel like a poor fade out or anything. There is a kind of emotional transition from the A-side’s more wandering vibe to the slightest surge of intensity on the B-side; the pause offered by flipping over the LP makes that effect even more noticeable, which can be a fun comparison.