There is a particular kind of darkness that becomes more interesting when you can finally make out the objects inside it. "That Porous Line", the latest album by Push For Night, works through this principle without mistaking increased visibility for comfort. Across seven pieces, Oliver Chapoy and James Elliott build a shifting electro-acoustic environment from guitar, bass, keyboards, percussion, synthesizers and processed fragments, letting these materials collide, overlap and occasionally behave as if they have forgotten what they were originally meant to do. The music is still strange, often murky and sometimes downright uncooperative, but it has acquired a more evident melodic instinct. If the duo’s previous work could feel like a prolonged encounter with a locked door, this album finds them experimenting with the hinges.

The opening “A Good Hosing Down” establishes the new balance. Small, bright instrumental gestures emerge through a grainy veil, suggesting a melody without quite settling into one. The piece has a curious organic quality, as if its sounds have been handled rather than manufactured, though the apparent simplicity is deceptive: textures gradually warp, and what initially seems welcoming becomes harder to place. The track’s title promises a thorough wash, but the music is less interested in cleanliness than in what happens when water gets into places it should not. The result is tactile, subtly disorienting and more patient than its occasional eruptions might suggest.

“Fang Vendor” introduces a different kind of physicality. Low frequencies and a slow, almost lurching pulse provide some sense of footing, while brittle electronic details and fragments of melody keep shifting the ground beneath it. There is something faintly absurd about the title, like a job description from an economy that has run out of respectable professions, and the music carries a comparable air of dislocated purpose. Its components seem to be negotiating their roles in real time, sometimes cooperating, sometimes interrupting each other with the enthusiasm of people who have all arrived at a meeting with different agendas.

The album’s central stretch is where its compositional patience becomes most apparent. “It’s Sure To Be Dark If You Shut Your Eyes” builds from scattered gestures and elusive rhythmic traces, with piano-like notes and processed fragments appearing and receding among denser layers. Instead of driving towards a conventional climax, it continually alters the listener’s sense of what deserves attention. A detail that seemed incidental acquires weight; another vanishes just as it begins to make sense. The piece is not so much a puzzle to be solved as a situation in which the clues keep changing their minds.

“Idler’s Reward” offers a more pronounced melodic thread, with Zachary Koeber’s clarinet adding a breathy, almost human counterweight to the electronic haze. Its development feels unusually spacious for a duo whose materials can be so densely layered. The music seems to pause, reconsider its direction and move again, allowing contrasts between sustained tones, instrumental fragments and more abrasive passages to register without forcing them into a tidy narrative. The title’s suggestion that doing very little might eventually pay off feels apt: the track rewards attention, but not the frantic sort that treats every second of music as a clue to an imminent revelation. Sometimes listening requires the radical act of not trying to improve the situation.

“Bait Is Lowered” is less accommodating. Its layers ripple and churn, with rhythmic elements appearing to surface before being pulled back under. There is a faintly predatory quality to the arrangement, as though the music were testing what it could draw into its orbit. Yet Push For Night resist the easy payoff of turning tension into sheer volume. Their disturbances are often more effective when they remain partial: an unexpected distortion, an awkward shift in texture, a sound that seems to have entered from another room and refuses to explain itself. The unease comes from the sense that the composition is active beneath its own surface, not from any obvious attempt to frighten the listener into submission.

At just over three minutes, “Turned Slowly And Slowly Turned” is the album’s briefest piece, but it does not function as a conventional interlude. Its comparatively concentrated span gives the record a moment of altered perspective, the title itself suggesting rotation without a clear distinction between movement and repetition. The closing title track then takes a gentler route, allowing melodic traces and more recognisable instrumental shapes to emerge without resolving the album’s peculiarities. The music does not suddenly step into daylight; it simply becomes easier to distinguish one thing from another. Even here, the edges remain unstable, and the listener is left with the impression that the apparent clarity might be temporary.

The contribution of David Daniell seems important to this change in character. His playing helped redirect the early sessions towards melody and spontaneity, and the duo’s decision to rely more on direct instrumental performance gives the record a different kind of vulnerability. Not every gesture sounds polished into inevitability. Some retain the slight awkwardness of an event that happened once and could not be reproduced in exactly the same way. That quality gives the album a sense of presence which heavy processing can sometimes obscure, even as the sounds are subsequently cut up, altered and reassembled.

The title "That Porous Line" suggests a boundary that still exists but no longer performs its job particularly well. Throughout the album, the distinction between acoustic gesture and electronic construction, between a deliberate musical phrase and a stray fragment, becomes permeable. Push For Night do not use this ambiguity merely as an aesthetic trick. It allows the compositions to remain unsettled while becoming more emotionally legible, as though melody were not the opposite of disorder but one of the ways disorder might briefly communicate.

There is still plenty here to unsettle anyone hoping for a straightforward ambient record, and the occasional density can make the music feel deliberately resistant to easy interpretation. But the shift in approach has given Push For Night a wider emotional range. "That Porous Line" is not darkness made cheerful, which would be a rather embarrassing misunderstanding of the assignment. It is darkness made more intricate, with enough warmth and melodic curiosity to reveal that obscurity need not mean emotional distance. The room remains strange; the difference is that its occupants have started playing music rather than merely rearranging the shadows.