Death has been something of a nearby spectre for me this year: we had my great-uncle’s funeral in February, an old colleague of ours died a few months later, and three of my colleagues have lost parents recently in quite quick succession. I could say that life is cruel like that sometimes but life isn’t cruel, it’s random, dispassionate. Maybe the most unsettling reality we must face is the inevitability that these events will come for us and our loved ones eventually, and the world will simply keep turning as though nothing ever happened.

Through Wayne’s social media postings I was aware of his mum’s passing a few years ago, an event the pain of which I can’t even begin to imagine. Eventually however doesn’t feel so much of an elegy for her, but a reflection on the loss, perhaps a philosophy on absence and the mechanics that led to this.

Allusions to circumstance can perhaps be seen in opener “Pericardium”, that layer that encapsulates and protects the heart. Medical terms that the lay-person rarely hears, but become of sudden and paramount importance when a loved one falls ill. It hums in shifting guitar drone layers, darkling and unsettled: suspended as it is, a moment of held time that hangs the future in its grasp.

It makes way for 20 minute album centrepiece “The Structural Dynamics of Flow”, a vehicle of of rarified drones that seems to move in slow motion. The undulating surface of a koi pond, the gentle whirrings of a dialysis machine, it hangs in a trance state, out of time almost, the world and its motions just…happening, with or without us.

It breaks the album. The three tracks on the other side are short fragments in comparison, and dwindle down: “Death Can’t Tear Us Apart” is the most on-the-nose, humming in ominous sodium glow. It creaks and groans in half-light miasma, the previous sensation of adriftness replaced with one of being simply lost, unsteady, afraid.

Shorter “Haddix” and even shorter fragmentary closer “Seconds to Minutes” cycle down considerably: piano strokes carve sadly through the heavy reverb of the former’s sullen airs. The latter meanwhile parts the fog of its predecessors in a brief moment of lightness right at the conclusion, life in our radius increasing its scope again as the loss retreats and the frequency of grief’s wavelength begins to redshift.

There’s still much in this world that humans are powerless to overcome, and I often wonder whether, in some distant future when ailments and even death are cured, we will lose some part of the very essence of the human condition. It’s hard to rationalise and understand the pain we’re forced to experience in this one life, and there’s little comfort in knowing that we’ll all face these eventualities, yet here we are, and here we struggle all the same.