I have a set of tarot cards. I can’t remember when I bought them exactly, a couple of years ago at this point, and I don’t use them very often, but people are quite surprised that I own a deck. In some ways, I’m surprised myself that I own them, but I have a strange fascination with tarot. I don’t believe there’s any higher spiritual force behind the random chance of a draw, and I know in my mind that “answers” are projections or externalisations from my sub-conscious onto coincidental cards, and yet…and yet…

I once heard someone describe why they used tarot as “when [her] heart is aching sufficiently, [she] turns to the Universe for answers”, which is perhaps the most elegantly poetical reasoning for, well, anything actually, and I understand it completely. A mechanism for processing the complications and convolutions of life through ourself in projection of the cards.

Within HTDC and EUS’ nicely contained new collab, there’s a sense of that strand of intrigue and even faith in the mysterious left in the universe, humming with a sort of edginess that straddles the divide between fact and feeling. It waits in limbo for answers to its struggles, the suspensory airs in the shifting drones and drifting electronics the moment in time between manifesting a response from the deck and flipping over the cards to reveal your destiny. It all exists as a crack of hopeful light to guide us towards and through an uncertain future.

Though both the seminal opener and closing “Day Again” sandwich the EP with glimpses of radiative light, the interior pieces seem to float in the darkness at the turning of the card. “Broken Spectre” hovers interminably in eerie, slowly convecting electronics, unsettled and mutable. “A Shimmer of Possibility” haunts with its whispered field recordings and static wash, a haze emanating aura-like from psychic instruction like ancient wisdom, before turning into the scuzzy flickerings and skitterings of penultimate “Mera”. Here, opportunity whips like distant lightning bolts through deep cloud that hides and secrets away the brilliant paths of its progeny, luminary strands that boil into the future.

There is always hope, always that thin crescent to cast a gentle shadow over the hillocks of our concerns and uncertainties, and much like the runtime of this EP, we hope for these moments to be flashing brevity before we’re ejected out the other side.