Floridian synthesist John Touchton aka Severed+Said returns with his most cinematic suite yet of witching hour electronics, spidery rhythm, and macabre clockwork: End Time Loop. A 10-track panorama of “paradise and devastation,” the music moves between sinkholes of low-end, darkened room drones, and strobing percussion, tracing shadows of swamps and derelict blocks. Inspired by the possibilities of a newly acquired hardware sequencer, and composing on headphones, Touchton atomized and re-assembled each song until an “absolute form” revealed itself.

His tunnel focus recording method gives the pieces a hermetic precision, mutating and rippling across grid-mapped webs of smoke, mirror, and mirage. Touchton’s youth in a Pentecostal church informs the album’s conflicted themes, a crossroads of “atrocities and kindness,” reckonings and rapture, vestigial dread born of crosses covered in dust. What lurks is what lasts, looping beneath the surface, as unseen as an ill wind. All End Times have their beginning.