Release Date: September 4th

Names On Tapes, Neil Kleiner and Stacey Hine, return with their fourth album, Ayin. Following Fossils, Ayin arrives as the most exposed and compositionally ambitious record the project has made.

The record takes its title from the Kabbalistic concept of Ayin — nothingness, or more precisely, the infinite void that precedes creation. In Jewish mystical thought, Ayin is not absence as lack but absence as potential: the generative emptiness out of which something can emerge. It is the state before form, before sound, before meaning — and also the condition that makes all three possible.

Built around the interplay between alto clarinet, guitar, live electronics and heavily manipulated rhythm, the record moves between moments of beauty, collapse and propulsion without ever fully settling into stability. The clarinet takes on a new role here: less textural, more lyrical, more human. It arrives as a voice rather than a layer. The guitar moves across a wider range than before — shimmering warmth in one track, widescreen melancholy in another, abrasive abstraction in a third.

Rhythm is the record’s central preoccupation and its central instability. Beats stumble, dissolve and mutate. Grooves are implied but rarely delivered. A pulse will emerge, establish just enough presence to feel load-bearing, then be interrupted or dismantled before it can settle.

The conceptual thread tying the pieces together is absence understood not as emptiness but as potential. Even in the record’s darkest moments, something is trying to surface. The collapse creates space. The album draws from degraded electronics, post-rock, cosmic jazz and early Warp Records experimentalism, with the uneasy cinematic atmosphere of Lynch and Cronenberg somewhere in the background. It is darker than Fossils, but also the most melodic and emotionally direct thing the project has made.

Names On Tapes

Names On Tapes – Ayin