Helsinki producer Eppu Kaipainen returns to Manchester’s Decaying Spheres imprint for his second outing, and Poiu — catalogue number DS003 — is a bold statement of intent. A seven-track, hour-long meditation on time perception, it unfolds through tape loops, saturated synths and layered modular sequences, all woven into a slow-burning drone tapestry that demands patience and rewards it handsomely.
The record’s central idea — how we measure, lose and stretch time — is announced by its titles, and the opening To See Wear Requires a Mindful Watcher functions as a kind of instruction: this is music that reveals itself to close attention. Languid tape hiss and gently detuned loops accrete over the first few minutes, the saturation thickening like sediment until the piece settles into a state of warm, humming suspension.
That sense of suspension carries into the eleven-minute Yeardays, which unfolds its sparse, tolling tones at a pace that feels almost geological, and the brief Personal Clocks, a duet with Dan Fingerman that offers a rare moment of human presence — a whispered interlude before the title track Poiu sinks back into deep, slow-breathing modular currents.
The second half continues the drift. Rifling Through a Lost & Found excavates dusty melodic fragments from beneath its tape haze, whilst A String of Weeks and the closing Place, Not Just a Space stretch time out to its most elastic, the latter ending the record on a note of quiet, open-ended resolution that lingers long after the final loop fades.
Mastered by Tim Crompton, Poiu has a wonderfully tactile low end and an airy, uncluttered top end that lets every texture breathe — and it’s easy to see why This Is Darkness hailed it “Outstanding!”. It’s not a record for the impatient; but for those willing to give it the hour it asks for, it’s a deeply rewarding study in stillness.
