The culmination of twenty-five years of shared experiments, rediscovered hard drives, and obsessive studio craft, Time & Space is the album that completes the initial "Delia square," sitting alongside label-mates Brown Fang and Torn Sail not just as a contemporary, but as a long-gestating counterpart. Produced by Matt Horobin and Mark Rayner, it is an album of "head music" in the truest sense, a world of shimmering sonics, dub-warmth, and ghosted melodies that asks you to stay a while and rewards every moment you do.
The sound is a corridor between worlds emerging from the duo's deep roots in Nottingham's underground house scene (where Rayner DJ'd alongside the likes of Harvey and Digs & Woosh), the sound of Time & Space sits in a unique "corridor" between genres. It triangulates the dream-haze of Cocteau Twins, the internal landscapes of Talk Talk and Ryuichi Sakamoto, and the dub-dislocated drift of early KLF and Massive Attack. It is electronica that feels organic; ambient that carries emotional weight.
As Horobin puts it: "It’s that feeling where music gives you the ‘drugged-up space’ without the drugs, where you’re in the sound, not just listening to it."
The process involved 25 years of cutting and combining, and while the album sounds pristine, its creation was tactile and instinctive. Horobin and Rayner developed a shared language of cut and paste audio, starting huddled over Akai and E-Mu samplers, and ending with computers they couldn’t have imagined at the start of the project, manipulating everything from musical saws to trombones until the seams disappeared.
"We’d sample it, resample it, distort it, turn it inside out, and make it feel like it belonged," Rayner recalls. The result is an album of enveloping warmth but forensic precision, where the dub-swung bass of "Blind Side" and the vibrating chords of "Vibra Marimba" feel like different rooms in the same architectural masterpiece, connected by a soft hum of electricity.
True to Delia’s ecosystem and ethos, Time & Space is a testament to the city's interconnectedness, featuring a wide cast from the label's extended family and friends:
Torn Sail’s Huw Costin, Henry Claude and John Thompson appear on the shimmering “Call Me When You Get There” while “Beautiful Thing” is lifted by Bettina Kristiansen’s vocals and Pete Yeadon’s trumpet. The two-part suite “54 Blues” expands into a live ensemble piece with Joel Clarke (drums), Paul Johnston (guitar), and Thompson (bass). “Calm Your Mind” and “Blind Side” feature Eleanor Forward’s ethereal voice and Jason Hart’s steel guitar.
A formative memory sits at the heart of the record, Horobin's teenage visits to a friend's bohemian family home with Japan and Peter Gabriel on the stereo, Tintin magazines on the table, and Lichtenstein's Whaam! on the wall. Next door, he would attempt to sync a Korg drum machine to New Order’s Brotherhood.
"Shrinkwrap," he explains, "is standing in the corridor between those two rooms." Time & Space makes that corridor real.
If Brown Fang maps the geography of the East Midlands, and Torn Sail traces the emotional terrain of humanity, Shrinkwrap turns the gaze inwards: to the spaces between thought, feeling, and sound.
