David Helpling & Eric "The "Taylor Head Into the Precious Dark: Echoes May CD of the Month
by John Diliberto 5/2/2025
The Precious Dark is a meeting of two, very different musical minds. David Helpling is a guitarist turned synthesizer architect, whose music usually has a penchant for melody and dynamism. You can hear that on his work with Jon Jenkins, all CD of the Month picks, as well as his solo releases, including his previous CD of the Month picks, Rune and In.
Eric “the” Taylor is less well-known. Along with Helpling, he’s part of the ambient quartet Dark Sky Alliance and he often collaborates with other electronica artists, like Mick Chillage in The Architects of Existence, and Icelandic techno artist, Futuregrapher. He also has several solo releases, and a band with Jerry Marotta and Rupert Greenall called The Fragile Fate. Except for Dark Sky Alliance, his sound is based in pure, abstracted ambience. No rhythms, no melodies, no dynamism.
But Helpling and Taylor have popped out of Dark Sky Alliance for an album that merges their sounds to create an immersive, and massive ambient space.
The duo never launches into a track. They always set a mood first, beginning with “The Space Between Atoms.” It comes in like a spaceship landing. Lurking in the background are faint, unidentifiable sounds. They could be bird chirps, creaking chairs or clattering cookware, but it’s all on the far periphery, suggesting a scene you might imagine. I suspect this is Taylor’s work
Then a piano in deep reverb plays a spare melody against glistening synth bells, deep bass booms, and faint electric guitar. A rapid shift, typical of Helpling’s composing, powers into a crushing syncopated rhythm, slashing keyboards and a charge into the breach. Once it hits that groove, the dynamism carries you along like a cyclotron blown into space. A brief drop into meditative space with a glockenspiel sound is just an illusion, a breath, before it launches again, finally dissolving into ambient space.
The title track seems to embody the overall emotional thrust of the album. Helpling and Taylor head into the dark to explore the darkness and maybe create a refuge from it. There’s a deep, sub-bass organ-like chord sequence that glacially underpins several sections of this work. Helpling drops guitar that actually sounds like guitar on it, unleashing spare notes in slow motion arpeggios. The track almost seems to end in the middle, but a few chimed notes signal a new path into the unknown.
“Cavernous Heart” is the prettiest, most cinematic track on the album. It’s led by guitar and pizzicato-like keyboard in its quieter moments and could be the soundtrack for a love scene. They create deep, layered string pads, an electronic orchestra driven to heavenly heights. But in its more foreboding moments, with sustained string pads and a deeper than deep bass drone, it could be the descent into pain and suffering.
Then the album takes a turn toward inner turmoil. You wouldn’t ever guess this from listening, but “The Ice Has Dreams” is inspired by John Carpenter’s 1982 film The Thing, both conceptually and musically. Imagine the Thing, an alien creature frozen in ice, dreaming in his frigid captivity. It is a dark, droning work which is as much sound design as composition. Without a cue from The Thing, you wouldn’t be wrong envisioning images from Blade Runner, especially with some of the icy decaying synth lines redolent of Vangelis. It’s more than half way through before a rhythm and melody show up; the rhythm a heartbeat thump, and the melody a disembodied piano against faint, distant horns.
As the title might suggest, “Her Endless Cold Embrace” continues the mood. Like a signal from a lost soul, it opens with what sounds like deep morse code against a swirl of synth pads, before once again hitting that spare, plucked piano sound they seem to love, articulating a melody that makes you wait for its resolution.
“For Those in Shadow” returns us to a more epic sound, with echo-delayed melodies, synthesizer timbres that sound like acoustic instruments from an alien planet, and those big bass drum hits that launch into a more energized sequence, and strangely on the fade out, space bongos.
The album closer, with the portentous title of “We Rise in a Harmonious System” is not the uplifting track you might suspect. It’s full of those Vangelis Blade Runner chords, swirling melodies and rhythm-free washes over an expansive, dystopian landscape. Half-way through, it takes a turn, with Helpling’s signature percussion and keyboard dynamic shift, something he’s been specializing in since his early, Patrick O’Hearn-influenced recordings.
The Precious Dark is not a sonic bath, but it is an immersion in an aural architectural space. It puts you in a world that is in constant flux and has secrets hiding in its corners. I should note that the album has the disclaimer: “Produced Entirely by Humans.” You can hear that in the sonic detail and the personal emotions that are channeled through every song.
The album comes packaged in photos by David Behringer and links to a digital booklet that includes a photo for each track. These surreal, abstract works, created from photographing puddles of water reflecting neon lights on the streets of Nagoya, are complimentary images for the music embodied in The Precious Dark.