M O S E D O gives the universe a suburban address on Black Hole Tapes (Remaster). Ask for Jake Frost. He will be in the garden, wearing old headphones, operating a receiver he built himself. His neighbours are asleep.

Already, I am on Jake’s side. Anyone prepared to spend the night pointing homemade equipment towards Cygnus has committed to a particular kind of curiosity. The album’s accompanying fiction gives him an extraordinary objective: recording signals from a distant black hole. The equipment belongs beside a garden shed. Somewhere between those two scales, this dark ambient record acquires its peculiar personality.

I would begin the book with the picnic table.

Set the receiver down. Give the machine the space ordinarily occupied by plates and somebody’s elbow. Let the domestic furniture retain its dimensions while the subject of the evening becomes almost offensively large. A black hole is an extravagant thing to bring into a garden. Jake has brought headphones.

The four recordings occupy roughly forty-five minutes, each lasting over ten. At that scale, listening involves a certain amount of housekeeping inside your own head. Thoughts arrive carrying unfinished business. You remember something trivial. The gloomy, enveloping sound continues. Eventually, the decision to attend to it becomes part of the experience: you are choosing the receiver over whatever else wants your attention.

Drone gives that choice a duration. Noise complicates the object of the choice. What, exactly, deserves attention inside a signal? The premise encourages you to treat the sound as material somebody has collected, something potentially worth examining. A stretch of dark ambience becomes an exhibit. Jake recorded this. Jake thought this mattered.

I find that small transfer of responsibility wonderfully effective. The fictional man has already done the waiting; the listener inherits his curiosity.

M O S E D O has worked with imagined settings before, including the underwater territory of Atlantis. Here, the garden supplies an especially useful restriction. Cosmic music can spend its entire allowance on immensity. Jake’s equipment has to fit somewhere. His body has to remain beside it. Throughout these long pieces, the story keeps returning the enormous subject to a person undertaking a practical task.

My reservation concerns how much interpretive work that person does. The four pieces sustain a dark ambient atmosphere, and the fiction supplies much of the specificity that makes this particular record intriguing. I am more attached to the act of reception than to the promise of cosmic terror. The black hole establishes the scale; the man operating the device earns my concern.

Even the unfamiliar characters used for the track names become interesting under those circumstances. I register them first as writing awaiting interpretation. Their appearance encourages an expectation of meaning, which is a sneaky thing to introduce into an album concerned with receiving something strange. You can spend quite a while deciding that a pattern must contain a message.

Leave Jake there for another page.

The story gives him a receiver, headphones and a direction in which to point his attention. The music gives the experiment enough time to become an occupation. Those long stretches ask the listener to participate in the waiting, accepting the sound before settling what it signifies.

By then, I want the garden kept in the book. Every square foot of it. The picnic table, the shed, the sleeping households nearby. Black Hole Tapes (Remaster) becomes most unsettling when the ordinary setting remains fully available to the imagination.

Forty-five minutes is a substantial portion of a night to surrender to a machine.