Roland Barthes’ Mourning Diary—a posthumously published set of fragments written as the French literary critic grieved his mother’s death—is a tumult of disembodied musings, one of which synthesist and producer M. Geddes Gengras repurposed for the title of Time Makes Nothing Happen. Originally self-released on Bandcamp in May, Time Makes Nothing Happen has been reissued six months later on experimental label Hausu Mountain, and the title increasingly reads more like a koan. If the pandemic lockdown in spring seemed to slow life to a crawl, how has our perception of time been further distorted, half a year on?
Recorded live by Gengras on modular synthesizer, Moog, and Elektron Machinedrum, the set’s teeming, sputtering morass of blips and squiggles has a mesmerizing effect. If every day since mid-March has felt a bit like Groundhog Day, this might be the soundtrack for it, reveling in the drudgery of quotidian routine.
Throughout Time Makes Nothing Happen, Gengras toys with the tropes of electronic dance music (repetition, meter, gridded quantization), only to gradually veer off into unkempt wilderness. The visuals accompanying both releases hint at that opposition: The cover of the Bandcamp release is a pane of glass that replicates a pattern of corrugated metal, while the Hausu Mountain art is a dense collage of video-game foliage. Building up and then erasing each component, the album can feel manicured in one stretch, corroded the next. Gengras’ approach makes his modular setup seem more like a terrarium in which total control is impossible; the would-be world-builder is resigned to patience, careful pruning, and a willingness to live with the outcome.
The title track summarizes the cumulative effect of the whole album in five minutes, presenting a seemingly impenetrable surface of bleeps, glassy timbres, and subliminal thumps. Gengras plays with expectations and anticipation as elements go blipping out of earshot and then fall back into place, to the point where you question if they ever actually vanished or were there all along. Rather than build toward release, the track instead dissolves into purgatory, like waiting on a subway platform for a train that scrapes and echoes down the tunnel yet never pulls into the station—and unexpectedly finding yourself standing not on concrete, but dirt.
In Gengras’ hands, motion itself becomes illusory. There’s a tingling electronic pulse at the start of “Time Is a Marble in a Bucket,” and the introduction of a deep bass throb conveys a quickening sensation. But just when a breakthrough feels imminent, you’re instead bundled in a staticky wool blanket, all crackle and dark space. Lullaby-like chimes are soon distended and paired with an approximation of a cowbell clonk on “Slip the Tape Through a Corkscrew, Pull and Repeat,” widening into a roomful of cuckoo clocks going haywire as they strike the hour.
The final tracks on the album add the Elektron Machinedrum and wind up in slightly more conventional territory; the only real surprise amid the straightforward, club-friendly thumps of “Bend (Edit)” and “Throttle” is that the floor never really drops away. Which feels a bit like an inversion of expectations, if only because after nearly an hour of dizzying befuddlement in the tangle of Geddes Gengras’ machines, when something finally happens on Time Makes Nothing Happen, it winds up feeling a little less interesting.
Buy: Rough Trade
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