Pakistani artist Asfandyar Khan channels something mysterious on his latest release - an emotion I can’t quite pick but it feels all too familiar. I first listened to the recording 30,000 feet in the air, travelling a touch under 900km/h and yet, I felt the plane was no faster than a passenger vehicle. The enveloping drones slowed time, or perhaps opened up an environment for things to just be.

With ‘A Different Sea’, drifting whirls of treated guitar fill up the space, with a repeating motif that mimics solemnity. At times, I thought I was listening to the brooding guitar work of Lift Your Skinny Fists era Godspeed You! Black Emperor, but the climactic payoff is absent and the track is perhaps better for it. It doesn’t call for bombast or celebration, but a slow and steady decline.

The release is tied together musically by recurrent motifs and ‘Brief Reprisals’, like distant memories in ambient form. Nothing is rushed, but as the release dives deeper into the motifs that have built there is an increasing level of haze. On ‘Cast Aside’ a blanket of soft guitar distortion envelopes this musical memory, and as the motif struggles to emerge from the haze the listener can feel that tension, the push and pull of something wanting to escape but ultimately being held down.

For a release with a title that implies things being pushed back to the last minute, the music itself feels anything but. Time is a construct that is stretched, musically and conceptually, evidenced by the recitation of Jean Arp’s poem The Plain at the beginning of penultimate track ‘Lumber’. “Time was an abstruse ghost, since nothing happened or changed” a female voice, barely audible, patiently enunciates. It is an apt descriptor for an album unconcerned by the abstract nature of time. Things will get done when they get done.

- Alex Stretton