Time is usually the one thing music pretends to control. Bars, beats, structures, neat little grids to reassure us that something is happening in order. "And All The Clocks Ran Dry" quietly dismantles that illusion and leaves you with something far less convenient: duration without guarantees.

The collaboration between Andreas Voelk - known for his work as Das Ende der Liebe - and Scott Monteith (better recognized as Deadbeat) unfolds across a single, uninterrupted session. No edits, no second thoughts, no polite corrections. Just two musicians in a Berlin studio, trusting that if they keep listening long enough, something will take shape. It’s a risky approach, mostly because it assumes restraint is more interesting than intervention. Somehow, they’re right.

Released on Room40, the album is split into two long movements that feel less like parts and more like phases of the same slowly evolving state. “Part I” opens in near suspension: a faint hum of electric organs, Rhodes tones stretched into soft halos, a space that feels less constructed than discovered. There’s an echo of dub here, but stripped of its rhythmic backbone, leaving only the sense of depth, of sound receding into itself.

Monteith’s history with dub techno lingers in the background, but it’s been carefully disarmed. No kicks, no obvious pulse. Instead, there’s a kind of phantom rhythm, implied rather than stated, like a memory of movement rather than movement itself. Voelk’s organ textures drift through this space, occasionally aligning into something that resembles harmony, only to dissolve again before it can settle.

“Part II” doesn’t so much continue as deepen. The material becomes slightly denser, though dense here is relative. Layers accumulate, but they never harden into structure. It’s more like sediment forming under water: slow, unstable, always subject to subtle shifts. Silence plays an equal role, not as absence but as a kind of pressure, shaping how the sounds are perceived.

The references are easy to spot if you care about that sort of thing. There are traces of Cluster in the drifting tonalities, a hint of Popol Vuh in the spiritualized calm, and the ghost of King Tubby in the way space itself becomes an instrument. But none of these dominate. They function more like distant landmarks than destinations.

What makes the album work is its refusal to dramatize improvisation. There’s no sense of “look, this is happening now”. Instead, the music behaves as if it would exist whether you were listening or not. It builds itself gradually, almost reluctantly, and then just as quietly recedes.
The analog setting matters too. Tape hiss, subtle imperfections, the slight instability of old keyboards. These aren’t nostalgic gestures; they’re part of the material. They remind you that this is a physical process, not just an abstract idea about sound.

Mastered by Lawrence English, the album maintains a delicate balance between clarity and diffusion. Nothing is overly defined, but nothing disappears completely either. It’s a careful equilibrium, one that mirrors the central idea: presence without fixation.

At around forty-five minutes, "And All The Clocks Ran Dry" doesn’t aim for revelation in the usual sense. It doesn’t build toward a climax or offer a resolution you can point to. Instead, it asks you to sit with a process that unfolds in real time, indifferent to your expectations.
Which is mildly inconvenient, given how used we are to things making sense on schedule.