10:30pm. Blue hour still persists: perhaps violet hour might be more appropriate now. Night seems to take forever to arrive as the year rushes closer to the Solstice, the Sun dragging in endless high arcs to extend the day, though one must presume its passage thusly as the daylight hours have been filled with skies numb with cloud and rain this week.

It’s quiet. The docks are subdued tonight, and in the gaps of the distant sounds of industry I hear my fingers on the keyboard and the clack of dog claws on the floorboards. They tap impatiently, waiting, past their bedtime, for my blue hour to close the day too. Yet I persist also, eking out a few more moments to stem the advance of time: how has this year gone by so fast? I close my eyes and another day opens again and again, Solstice length or no I can’t stop it, can’t seem to hold on to the lingering light.

Yet allowing myself to pause seems…wrong, or at least, difficult. I feel this weight of time on my shoulders as Atlas handled the inexorable force of the world, but I’m instead holding a finite load diminishing with every passing hour. And to pause, to pause would allow everything to settle on me on: I can’t stop running quite yet. Sleep is just a punctuation mark.

Chihei’s work over the years has been imbibed with something in the way of sleep’s meditative lull, guitar tones smeared out into ambience outside of the conscious. Quiet chords across the six pieces here pick out glassily against enormous reverb, as fireflies bursting and vanishing in twilight. These drones seem to hang in the air heavily (albeit sonically lightly), veils drawn all around us only countered by brief sparks beyond, just enough hope to provide impetus through to the other side.

Much or all of the record moves in Chihei’s idiosyncratic guitar drones, which former listeners will know well. And whilst the overall mood of Unconscious Silence is rather distant, it does move with a deep sense of urgency in places. Tracks 3 and 5 for example shift and churn continuously, something always moving behind the cloud layer as hidden stars retrace their positions, rewinding the mechanism that returns the Sun.

Another day is ending, another one is soon to rise. I’m tired, but I won’t slow just yet.
Not just yet.