Phil Coy’s "60bpm 33rpm" begins with one of those sounds that civilisation has trained us to ignore: a clock ticking somewhere nearby. We normally hear such sounds only when they stop, which is perhaps the most revealing thing about our relationship with time. The clock is allowed to organise our lives precisely because we have agreed not to listen to it. Coy’s record asks what happens when we do.

The source is the Benjamin Vulliamy turret clock installed at St George’s Church in Ramsgate in 1829, and Coy’s original "sixty beats per minute" was a two-month, site-specific installation there in 2025. Microphones amplified the mechanism into the church nave while a digital timecode followed its rhythm. Every six minutes, however, the system changed direction, sending the previous six minutes backwards through the speakers. The installation effectively turned the church into an instrument whose principal musician was a piece of Victorian engineering.

On record, the spatial complexity inevitably changes. The surround installation becomes an 18-minute stereo piece, and the church itself is no longer physically present. Yet this loss is partly compensated by the peculiar physicality of vinyl. The 33rpm object contains concentric grooves that echo the circular mechanics of the clock, turning the record into something more than a carrier for the sound. It becomes a small, black machine for contemplating machinery. Coy’s first vinyl release therefore makes considerable sense as an object, even before the stylus begins its pilgrimage around the edge.

The first side is remarkably patient. The clock does not announce itself as an artistic device; it simply ticks, while Ramsgate leaks into the recording: birds, distant voices, traffic and the indistinct activity of a town going about its business. The important thing is that the clock does not sit above this material as some grand philosophical narrator. It is embedded in it. Human activity happens underneath the beat, just as it does in ordinary life, where deadlines, school runs, meals, sleep and minor catastrophes all take place under the supposedly neutral authority of the second hand. Then the reversal arrives.

It is an excellent trick because it is so physically wrong. Reversed sound has an immediately recognisable unnatural quality, but Coy avoids turning the effect into a mere piece of audio sleight-of-hand. The backward clock seems to expose the difference between recorded time and lived time. A recording can reverse what has happened. Experience cannot. You can replay an argument, a childhood, a bad decision or an entire decade as many times as you like, but nobody has yet discovered the rewind button for consequences. Human civilisation has managed to invent clocks, databases, surveillance cameras and cloud storage, but apparently not a decent undo function.

That tension gives "60bpm 33rpm" its real weight. The clock represents time as measurement, while the reversal exposes measurement as an agreement rather than an absolute law. Six minutes can be divided, displayed, recorded, repeated and inverted, but none of these operations actually returns the world to the state it occupied six minutes earlier. Coy’s work therefore creates a small but quite unnerving gap between chronological time and perceptual time.

This concern fits naturally within his broader practice. Coy is an interdisciplinary artist whose work moves between sculpture, photography, film, performance and site-sensitive sound, with particular attention to the histories and architectures of specific places. His permanent "Stereo Pair" at Brunel University, for example, emerged from the history of acoustic listening technologies and pre-radar sound mirrors, while his work more generally tends to make architecture behave less like a passive container and more like an active participant.

That background matters here because "60bpm 33rpm" is not really a field recording in the conventional sense. Coy is not merely documenting Ramsgate, nor is he using the clock as convenient atmospheric decoration. He constructs a situation in which the place, the mechanism and the recording technology interfere with one another. The clock produces the pulse; the microphones transform it; the software decides when the past will be replayed; the church colours the sound; and the vinyl subsequently gives the whole process another circular body. Each stage alters what came before.

And then Adrian Sherwood gets involved, which is where the supposedly disciplined clock starts losing its trousers.

The second side consists of four dub treatments of the material, produced and mixed by Sherwood at On-U Sound Studios with Mark Bandolla on guitar and keyboards, Duncan Mackay on trumpet, Alex White on saxophone and flute, and Ivan Hussey on cello. Sherwood is almost absurdly well suited to the task. Since the late 1970s, his work has been built around treating recorded sound as something elastic: delay, echo, repetition, subtraction, distortion and spatial displacement become compositional tools rather than post-production cosmetics.

His contribution changes the philosophical temperature of the project. Where Coy’s side makes time strange by reversing it, Sherwood makes it unstable by multiplying it. The clock’s regular pulse is fed through dub’s familiar machinery and comes back wearing different clothes. Bass, percussion, horns, guitar and echoes establish alternative trajectories around the original beat. The clock is still there, but its authority has been seriously compromised.

This is perhaps the smartest pairing in the project. Dub has always possessed an unusual relationship with chronology. It takes something already recorded and turns it into a new event, often making the studio itself audible in the process. Sherwood does not simply decorate Coy’s concept with reggae-derived effects. He applies a production philosophy that has been concerned for decades with breaking linear musical expectation. The result is a dialogue between two kinds of temporal sabotage: Coy reverses the clock; Sherwood makes the clock proliferate.

The four dub pieces also prevent the album from becoming overly solemn. There is a temptation in sound art involving churches, nineteenth-century clocks, existential time and the crisis of modern temporality to start speaking as though every ticking second were personally responsible for the decline of Western civilisation. Sherwood provides a useful corrective. Suddenly the great mechanical order is wobbling, echoing and acquiring horns. The clock has gone from authority figure to unreliable bandleader.

The locked groove at the end completes the joke with unusual precision. Instead of allowing time to proceed toward an ordinary conclusion, the record becomes physically incapable of reaching one. The stylus keeps circling the same tiny section, producing repetition without progress. It is both a literal property of the medium and an almost embarrassingly efficient metaphor for the human condition. We invented clocks to organise time, records to preserve it, and now the record gets stuck. Somewhere, a Victorian engineer is presumably filing a complaint.

What saves "60bpm 33rpm" from being merely clever is Coy’s sensitivity to sound as evidence. The distant life of Ramsgate remains crucial. The clock does not exist in abstraction; it is surrounded by the unpredictable noises of people, animals, weather and the town itself. When these sounds are reversed, their familiarity becomes subtly grotesque. The past does not return as memory. It returns as material that has been processed incorrectly.

That distinction is important. Coy is not claiming that time can be undone. He demonstrates how easily our perception of sequence can be manipulated. Six minutes forward and six minutes backward are technically composed of the same sonic material, yet they do not feel remotely equivalent. The difference lies not in the sounds themselves but in our expectation of causality. We expect footsteps to follow bodies, voices to emerge from mouths, birds to make noise before silence follows them. Reverse the order and the ordinary world becomes uncanny without any additional sound being introduced.

There is something quietly political in this, too. Mechanical clock time was historically tied to industrial discipline, punctuality, labour and the increasing standardisation of everyday life. The Ramsgate turret clock belongs to precisely that historical transformation, while its contemporary digital counterpart belongs to an era in which time has become even more pervasive: notifications, timestamps, calendars, productivity software, surveillance and the permanently available workplace. Coy’s machine is old, but the problem it exposes is painfully current.

The record does not offer an escape from this system. It does something more useful: it makes the system audible. And once time becomes audible, it stops seeming quite so inevitable.

"60bpm 33rpm" is therefore a modestly sized work with an unusually large subject. Its materials are simple: a clock, a town, a church, microphones, software, vinyl and a dub producer with an apparently inexhaustible supply of echoes. But their combination produces a strange little disturbance in our confidence that yesterday, today and tomorrow are as neatly separated as the numbers on a clockface suggest.

Time keeps moving, naturally. It has never listened to human requests.

But for roughly forty minutes, Coy and Sherwood make a convincing case for refusing to listen to it quite so obediently.