Oliver Coates has a way of turning sound into something tactile - like a breeze that whispers secrets, or a light rain that feels like it's massaging your soul. In "Throb, shiver, arrow of time", his latest album for RVNG Intl., the British cellist, composer, and sonic sculptor offers an emotional labyrinth: ten tracks that shimmer with memory’s imperfection and the soft ache of time slipping through your fingers.

This album doesn’t just play music - it plays with time, with texture, and with the listener’s sense of place. Coates, a master at blurring the digital and the analogue, starts with the earthy resonance of the cello and stretches it, distorts it, and folds it back on itself. The result feels like you’re peering into a kaleidoscope of sound, where past and present collide, and emotions swirl in a haze of forgotten dreams.

At the album’s heart lies "Shopping centre curfew", a piece inspired by a dream fusing two surreal, pandemic-era realities: the demolition of South London’s Elephant and Castle shopping centre and the proposed curfew for men following a violent crime. It’s short but haunting - a stark reminder of how memory, fear, and imagination can intertwine into something powerfully unsettling.

Coates surrounds this core with a suite of tracks that range from fragile to ferocious. "Ultra valid" opens the album with a spiraling energy, like a clock winding up for some cosmic joke. "Apparition" features Malibu’s ethereal vocals, which hover like a ghostly lullaby, while "Living branches", with chrysanthemum bear, feels like walking through a forest where each tree hums a different note of your childhood. Meanwhile, Faten Kanaan’s synths on "Backprint radiation" add a celestial sheen, their glow soft yet unnervingly precise.

Coates himself likens the music to weather - sometimes gentle and embracing, other times brutal and eroding. His cello, a melancholy yet luminous guide, alternates between soaring melodies and glitchy, fragmented echoes. It’s as if he’s inviting the listener to experience both the beauty of the instrument and its degradation, like staring at a faded photograph that somehow gains depth the more it loses clarity.
The album crescendos with "Make it happen", a nearly seven-and-a-half-minute masterpiece that feels like time itself is coming apart at the seams. It’s defiant, desperate, and impossibly alive, as if Coates is willing the music to persist beyond its end, to keep vibrating in the air even as the silence creeps in.

Coates cites artist Sarah Sze’s visual installations as an inspiration, and it shows - this album is as much about what you hear as what you "feel": the flickering afterimages, the tactile sense of sounds rubbing against each other. It’s both deeply cerebral and profoundly visceral.

With "Throb, shiver, arrow of time", Oliver Coates has crafted an album that feels timeless, in every sense of the word. It’s a sonic experiment, a memory machine, and a meditation on what it means to hold onto something fleeting. For anyone willing to step into its shifting corridors, it offers a uniquely resonant journey - one that lingers, like the afterglow of a sunset you wish you’d stared at just a little longer.