The mysterious halo around the name of John T.Gast - supposedly a fake identity -, who credited on Hype Williams' LP "Black Is Beautiful" as well as on different releases of both Dean Blunt and Inga Copeland aka Karen Glass, the two legs of Hype Williams, got fostered by this album, whose mysterious halo as well as the above-mentioned connection with the likewise mysterious Hype Williams, whose amazing and somehow original aesthetics where an elusive bubble of synth-pop, lo-fi tunes, soundcollages, trip-hop like desolation, songwriting, garage and bass-driven music resurfaced from London's chaotic nebula of UK minimal-synth sonorities that got spread out since the first years of the new millunium, makes sense. The words by which Gast's debut got introduced, which refers to both sentimental and seasonal freezing and battling ("The majority recorded early 2014 in SW England. A particularly fierce winter. Woman reasserting power. Man fighting in the dark. The Cold War continues."), are the framwork for most of the sonorities that are going to be poured into headphones and loudspeakers: the opening drone of "Shanti-ites" sounds like the opening of a magical floodgate, which got gradually released on the viscuously acid movement of the following "Infection" and the weirding housey modules of "Congress", whose lubricated groove counterbalances a set of sonic entities which screech like brakes. The confused cauldron of vocal snippets of "£" got poured into the overshadowed tones of "Ceremony", which could surmise some clouded stuff by Future Sound Of London and prepares the listener to the darker part of the album: with the exception of the groovy strangulation and the Detroitesque tech-house swings of the tail on "Claim Your Limbs", the gloomy "Green", which could let listener imagine a spectral ship in the thick fog of London's harbour which is going to set sail, the perfumed soot and the thrilling noir atmospheres of "White Noise/Dys", an excerpt which got reprised before the end, as well as the electronic eddies of "Sedna" tunnel listeners into the oblique sense of otherness and blissfully terse alienation of the final "Torch". John Y Gast's hypnagogic refluxes are so closer to Hype Williams' one than I won't wonder to know John is just their brainchild.