Our Solar System - 2016 - In Time

Beyond Beyond Is Beyond Records – none

 The title In Time contains a wonderfully unstable promise. To play “in time” ordinarily means to obey a shared pulse, to occupy the proper position inside a measurable sequence and arrive exactly when expected. Our Solar System assemble fifteen musicians and spend forty-four minutes demonstrating that collective time can be far stranger than obedience. Each player remains connected to the others, yet the music continually stretches, compresses, accelerates and dissolves the clock by which that connection might be measured. Everyone is in time, but time itself has become liquid.

The name Our Solar System provides an unusually precise model for the group’s organization. A solar system is not a row of objects following instructions from a conductor. It is a field of bodies whose movements are created through relationships. Some are enormous, some barely visible; some follow stable paths, while others arrive at eccentric angles or pass through only once. Gravity provides coherence without requiring uniformity. Our Solar System work in a similar fashion. Bass, drums, guitars, saxophone, clarinet, flute, violin, piano, organ, synthesizer, oud, percussion and voices do not line up politely to perform a predetermined hierarchy. They become masses exerting force upon one another.

The group has described itself as a floating crowd, open to musicians willing to create within its cosmic framework. That openness is not merely a romantic biography attached to otherwise conventional rock arrangements. It is audible in the music’s construction. No instrumental personality is permitted to govern the entire journey, and the listener is rarely handed one obvious protagonist to follow. The center keeps changing. A saxophone may seem to be guiding the ensemble until bass and drums reveal that they have quietly altered the direction of travel. Piano enters and redraws the horizon. Guitar gathers enough density to become weather. A human voice appears not to explain what has happened, but to join the material already in orbit.

In Time reduces this large population to two compositions, one occupying each side of the record. “In the Beginning of Time” lasts twenty minutes and twenty-six seconds; “At the Edge of Time” extends to twenty-three minutes and thirteen seconds. These are not songs expanded by solos until they fill an LP side. They are temporal environments. Entering halfway through would resemble arriving in the middle of a migration and mistaking the current formation for its point of origin. The meaning lies partly in remembering how the ensemble reached each condition.

“In the Beginning of Time” starts appropriately close to formlessness. Saxophone, synthesizer and surrounding electronic atmosphere appear before the music has established a firm surface. A bass line slowly becomes perceptible, less like an opening riff than the first reliable law of physics. It does not immediately command the other players. It provides enough gravity for their movements to begin acquiring relation.

The drums enter gradually, and the piece starts collecting definition. The important word is collecting. A conventional arrangement might announce its beat, establish a chord sequence and identify the main instrument within seconds. Our Solar System allow organization to emerge from the interactions themselves. Matter gathers. Repetition becomes orbit. What first sounded like unrelated particles begins forming a system without any single moment at which chaos officially becomes composition.

The album’s cosmic vocabulary could easily have produced decorative space rock, with synthesizer effects representing stars while a guitar band performs underneath. Our Solar System take the concept more seriously. Space is not simply a theme applied to the music. It is the condition allowing the music to occur. The arrangements require large areas of apparent emptiness so that the entrance of one instrument can change scale. A flute or piano figure matters because it appears inside a field already charged by everything absent from it.

This is especially clear during the first half of “In the Beginning of Time.” The saxophone does not immediately behave as a free-jazz soloist, even though its tone introduces that possibility. It searches, repeats and hovers around the emerging structure. Echo makes some phrases appear farther away than their physical source, creating several imagined distances within the same recording. A note may be produced in the room and answered by its own ghost somewhere beyond the speakers.

The connection to jazz therefore lies as much in listening as in vocabulary. Fifteen musicians cannot play freely together merely by refusing structure. They must recognize which gesture requires an answer, which should be allowed to remain alone and when adding another sound would reduce rather than increase the music’s possibilities. In Time repeatedly demonstrates this collective discipline. Its abundance never becomes fifteen people shouting their credentials at once.

As the first side continues, the rhythm begins tightening. Hand percussion, clapping and drums increase the sense of communal motion, while repeated keyboard and bass figures pull the ensemble toward the motorik zone associated with Can and other German experimental groups. Yet Our Solar System do not imitate the clean forward line of a machine. Their rhythm continually reveals human asymmetry. The pulse is stable enough to enter physically, but crowded with tiny pushes, delays and irregular accents that prevent it from becoming automatic.

This relationship between regularity and disorder gives the album its peculiar exhilaration. The music does not alternate neatly between composed sections and free passages. Order is continually being born inside apparent chaos, while chaos remains alive inside the order. The more coherent the groove becomes, the more opportunities individual musicians find to stretch against it. The stronger the orbit, the more dramatic each deviation appears.

Around the middle of “In the Beginning of Time,” the saxophone begins applying greater pressure, and the ensemble’s slow accumulation turns into genuine combustion. Piano, guitars and percussion are no longer objects appearing one at a time in empty space. They have become part of a rotating mass whose velocity is increasing. The piece starts to feel less like observing a solar system from a safe distance and more like being caught inside its formation.

The resulting intensity has affinities with psychedelic rock, free jazz and Swedish communal improvisation, but none of those descriptions completely explains its emotional effect. Psychedelia accounts for the altered sense of duration. Jazz accounts for the responsiveness among players. Krautrock accounts for the commitment to pulse. Progressive rock accounts for the scale and long-form development. Yet the music’s real identity lies in the refusal to keep those languages in separate departments.

A saxophone phrase may carry free-jazz heat while riding a bass pattern closer to dub or psychedelic rock. Piano can enter with the density of an improvised jazz cluster, then become part of a repeating rhythmic mechanism. Guitar distortion creates mass rather than heroic spectacle. Flute and violin introduce acoustic colors without transporting the music into a pastoral interlude. Each tradition becomes a temporary behavior available to the collective rather than a genre the whole band must suddenly adopt.

The use of multiple bass instruments is particularly important. In a group this large, low frequencies could easily become mud, but bass serves as the organizing gravity. Its repetition creates enough certainty for everything above it to behave unpredictably. The bass does not merely hold the music down. It makes expansion possible. Because one body keeps returning to the same route, fifteen others can temporarily forget where the ground is.

The drums perform a related function without becoming a metronome. Rather than simply increasing speed, they alter the density of time. A passage may feel as though it is accelerating even when the underlying pulse has barely changed because more events are being fitted into each cycle. This is one of In Time’s finest illusions: the clock can remain steady while subjective time begins racing.

By the final stretch of “In the Beginning of Time,” the ensemble has moved from invocation into something resembling collective possession. Saxophone, keyboards, guitars and percussion no longer seem arranged in front and background. The entire stereo field has become active. The pleasure comes from hearing fifteen separate intentions generate one event without becoming indistinguishable. The mass is enormous, but the record still permits flashes of individual human decision inside it.

The side eventually releases its accumulated force rather than ending with a hard declaration. The system disperses enough to make silence conceivable again. This descent matters because it transforms everything that preceded it. A climax without aftermath becomes a stunt. Our Solar System allow the listener to feel the energy leaving the structure, like heat radiating from matter after an immense collision.

“At the Edge of Time” begins from another state of uncertainty. Piano, keyboards and electronic effects are more immediately prominent, producing a softer but stranger environment than the first side’s saxophone-led awakening. The title shifts the scale of the question. The beginning of time concerns origin, the moment when matter and sequence become possible. The edge of time concerns whatever happens when sequence can no longer continue. It is not simply the end of an album. It is the boundary beyond which “before” and “after” may lose their usefulness.

Voices appear early in the piece, but they do not bring ordinary lyrics or narrative certainty. They operate as mantra, breath and recurring human signal. Their calm repetition contrasts with the increasingly active instrumental field, creating the sensation that a small group is maintaining a ritual while weather grows violent around it. The voices do not conquer the chaos. They remain present inside it.

That relationship makes “At the Edge of Time” more seductive than its companion side. “In the Beginning of Time” builds outward from elemental sound into ecstatic motion. “At the Edge of Time” begins with a more recognizable human presence and gradually makes that presence seem mysterious. The voice, supposedly our most direct instrument of identity, becomes one texture among reeds, strings, electricity and percussion.

This is an essential part of the collective’s philosophy. Their performances have involved matching garments marked with planetary symbols, minimizing individual visual hierarchy in favor of the shared concept. On the record, the same idea operates acoustically. The singer is not elevated automatically because human language is assumed to be more meaningful than instrumental sound. A repeated vocal phrase can orbit beside a synthesizer tone or saxophone line without claiming the center.

The result recalls ritual without pretending to reconstruct one particular historical ceremony. Nothing here announces itself as an authentic ancient practice. The ritual is being invented by the musicians as it occurs. Repetition produces familiarity; familiarity produces participation; participation gradually makes the music feel as though it existed before the performers entered the room. That is how newly created forms sometimes acquire the emotional weight of tradition.

As “At the Edge of Time” gathers momentum, the voices become part of a wider pattern involving bass, drums and keyboards. The rhythm is less immediately explosive than the first side’s central ascent, but more hypnotic. Rather than continually climbing, the ensemble circles. Each return deepens the groove until repetition stops feeling like recurrence and begins feeling like location.

This is where the title In Time performs another reversal. The musicians remain precisely connected, but the listener may lose any reliable sense of elapsed minutes. Twenty-three minutes do not feel like twenty-three identical units. Some passages appear to widen, while others pass almost without leaving a measurable interval. The album does not take the listener outside time through mystical assertion. It changes the listener’s perception of time through musical labor.

The jazz elements also change character on the second side. Saxophone eventually enters with considerable force, but it arrives inside a world already formed by voices and keyboards. It must negotiate with the existing atmosphere rather than simply claim the spotlight. The horn can cut through the ensemble, but its power partly comes from hearing resistance around it. Every instrument changes what freedom means for the others.

The piano repeatedly provides a fascinating bridge between jazz improvisation and kosmische repetition. It can scatter notes across the rhythm, then suddenly reinforce a figure with almost percussive insistence. Piano is both a harmonic instrument and a machine containing eighty-eight hammers; In Time remembers the machine. Its attack helps divide the flowing music into physical moments without reducing that flow to a grid.

Organ and synthesizer work differently. They stretch across the gaps, connecting moments that percussion and piano have separated. Sustained tones make the music feel continuous even as individual parts arrive and vanish. The record’s temporal illusion depends upon this combination. Some instruments count time; others blur the boundaries between the counts.

Guitars also avoid the standard psychedelic role of delivering one spectacular solo above the band. They operate as density, friction and changing light. A repeated guitar figure can become another rhythmic gear, while distortion enlarges the perceived environment. When the music approaches overload, guitar is difficult to separate from organ, saxophone or electronics. Their identities merge at the edges while remaining different at the source.

This collective blending has a clear Swedish ancestry. Groups emerging from Pärson Sound, International Harvester and Träd, Gräs och Stenar treated repetition as a social practice, not merely a compositional technique. A simple figure could be maintained long enough for musicians and listeners to inhabit it together. Technical mastery mattered less than the capacity to sustain communal attention. Our Solar System inherit that permission while adding a broader instrumental palette and the rapid responsiveness of contemporary improvised music.

The connection became almost architectural when In Time was recorded at Silence Studio in rural Värmland. Silence was created as more than a sealed commercial room; its large building, multiple acoustic spaces and live-recording design allow musicians to spread through a shared environment while remaining connected. For a fifteen-person collective, that is not a neutral technical detail. The building becomes another member, determining which sounds reach one another directly and which arrive through walls, halls and microphones.

Silence also carries a long relationship with Swedish independent and experimental music. Recording there places Our Solar System within a physical history rather than merely referencing older records stylistically. The same idea of collective exploration that animated portions of Swedish progg can continue inside the building without being reproduced exactly. History becomes acoustics.

This does not make In Time an exercise in national tradition. The music listens too widely for that. Alice Coltrane’s spiritual expansiveness, Can’s rhythmic concentration, early Pink Floyd’s willingness to treat sound as environment, free jazz, psychedelic rock, folk instrumentation and the cosmic scale associated with Sun Ra all hover nearby. The album does not combine them through scholarly quotation. Fifteen musicians have absorbed different histories, and those histories encounter one another through playing.

The comparison to Sun Ra is especially tempting because both projects use cosmic language and a large, fluid ensemble. Yet their uses of space differ. Sun Ra’s cosmology was inseparable from Black history, liberation, mythology and the invention of another possible social identity. Our Solar System’s cosmos is less narrative and more organizational. It offers a model in which individuality can remain active without requiring a permanent leader. The universe becomes an argument for collective authorship.

That argument is not utopian in a simple sense. Large-group improvisation can fail spectacularly. Too many people may produce caution, with everyone afraid to interfere, or noise without relationship, with every player attempting to demonstrate freedom simultaneously. In Time is exciting because failure remains possible. The ensemble repeatedly approaches overload, but listening keeps the structure alive.

One can hear this in the passages where intensity drops unexpectedly. A large band accelerating toward a climax possesses obvious momentum. The harder decision is to reduce sound together without one musician continuing the previous argument. These collective decelerations show trust. Players recognize that emptiness is not the absence of music but another shared action.

“At the Edge of Time” eventually passes through one such reduction and reconstitutes itself around a steadier rhythmic motion. The late section carries the deep, repetitive propulsion associated with Can, but its surface remains crowded with specifically human detail. The groove is not a railway track disappearing toward infinity. It is a procession whose participants keep changing position while continuing in the same direction.

The mantra-like voices become particularly moving here. Earlier they supplied calm against instrumental turbulence. Later they feel like a memory the music has carried through its transformations. Their return is not identical because the surrounding world has changed. Repetition demonstrates that the same phrase can mean something different after twenty minutes of experience.

This is also how the album treats its title. “In the beginning” and “at the edge” sound like opposites, but the vinyl format places them beside one another in a cycle. The needle reaches the edge of the first side, the listener turns the record, and another beginning occurs. At the edge of the second side, the record can be flipped again. Recorded time repeatedly dies and is restarted by a human hand.

The smokey black-and-white vinyl edition makes this cycle visible. Its colors swirl without forming an identical pattern in every copy, an appropriate body for music in which shared parameters generate unpredictable details. The groove carries fixed information, but each playback occurs in another room, through another system, at another point in the listener’s life. Mechanical repetition becomes experiential variation.

The cover performs a related trick. Figures appear as dark silhouettes beneath a violently illuminated cosmic projection, with the largest light source almost obliterating the top of the image. The people are visible because light strikes around them, but their individual features are withheld. One raised hand seems to point, conduct, greet or surrender. The photograph captures collective activity while refusing the usual hierarchy of the band portrait.

The blazing sphere behind them may be a sun, planet, projection or stage effect, but it is far larger than any person in the frame. The image places human makers inside the phenomenon they are creating. They are not presenting the cosmos from outside. They have been reduced to bodies moving within it.

This is one reason In Time avoids the grandiosity that often follows cosmic rock. The album is immense, but none of its musicians claims personal ownership of that immensity. Scale is generated through cooperation. A bass note becomes enormous because drums, piano, organ, reeds and guitar adjust their positions around it. A small repeated vocal phrase acquires ceremonial power because fifteen people make room for its return.

There is joy throughout the record, even during its most disorienting passages. The music is not traveling into space because Earth has become contemptible. It is enlarging the terms under which earthly people can play together. Every sound comes from ordinary bodies, wood, metal, electricity, stretched strings, animal breath and hands striking surfaces. The cosmic effect is assembled from intensely local physical actions.

That gives the title one final meaning. These musicians are not simply in musical time or cosmic time. They are in their particular historical time, able to inherit free jazz, Swedish progg, krautrock, psychedelia, folk instruments, home electronics and decades of recorded experimentation without treating any one tradition as a locked room. The past is available, but not compulsory. It supplies tools for producing a present that none of those earlier movements could have predicted exactly.

A revivalist group might reconstruct one favorite year with great accuracy. Our Solar System allow many eras to coexist until chronology becomes less useful. An oud can sound ancient beside a synthesizer; a motorik rhythm can support improvisation whose phrasing belongs to no fixed decade; a flute can enter electric density without symbolizing a return to nature. The instruments carry histories, but the ensemble decides how those histories behave now.

In Time is therefore not formless. Its form is gravitational. Themes, timbres and rhythms attract one another, remain together for a period and then separate when another center becomes stronger. The listener may not be able to draw a conventional song diagram, yet every transformation follows from pressures established earlier. Nothing needs to arrive through a verse or chorus in order to feel inevitable.

The record’s two enormous sides also restore a scale of attention that digital listening frequently fragments. They ask for commitment before providing certainty about what the commitment will yield. Twenty minutes is long enough for impatience to appear, be recognized and gradually converted into another mode of listening. The album’s trance is not instantaneous. It is constructed through remaining.

That remaining is where the music becomes generous. Our Solar System do not demand that listeners understand fifteen simultaneous contributions. They offer several possible routes. Follow the bass and experience the album as gravitational rhythm. Follow the saxophone and hear pressure seeking freedom. Follow the keyboards and encounter shifting architecture. Follow the voices and the record becomes a ceremony. Stop following any individual element, and the entire ensemble becomes weather.

Anyone who saw this configuration perform, visited Silence Studio, knows which musician generated a particular fleeting sound, or remembers how these pieces changed onstage may possess another route through the system. Those details would be valuable, especially for a collective whose official credits intentionally emphasize participants more than instrumental ownership. The mystery is not a failure of documentation. It keeps listening from becoming an exercise in assigning every light to a name.

In Time begins with matter learning to move together and ends at the boundary where movement threatens to lose sequence. Between those points, fifteen people construct a universe without appointing anybody its ruler. They enter the same time, alter it through attention and leave behind two grooves capable of restarting the event whenever another hand lowers the needle.

The system remains stable. Everything inside it is still moving.