Ancient Lights — Uniting Of Opposites (2018)
Music that doesn’t rush you — it waits
By Rafi Mercer
Some albums arrive with urgency. Others arrive with patience. Ancient Lights belongs firmly to the second group. It doesn’t demand your attention — it earns it, slowly, by creating a world that feels older than genre and quieter than trend.
This is not an album built for momentum. It’s built for presence.
Ancient Lights is the debut full-length release from Uniting Of Opposites, a trio whose very name hints at their intent. Electronic producer Tim Liken, sitarist Clem Alford, and bassist Ben Hazleton come from different musical lineages, but they don’t attempt to fuse them into something flashy or exotic. Instead, they let each language remain intact, allowing the tension between them to do the work.
From the opening moments, you sense restraint. Rhythms are loose rather than driven. Melodies circle rather than announce themselves. Space is treated as a compositional tool — silence carrying as much meaning as sound. This is music that understands that depth doesn’t come from density.
There’s a distinctly ritual quality to the record. Indian classical motifs surface and recede, not as decoration, but as structural threads. Jazz improvisation provides elasticity, giving the music room to breathe and bend. Electronic textures are present, but never dominant — used to colour the air rather than control it.
The title track, Ancient Lights, feels like the emotional centre of the album. Vocals drift in with a human fragility that contrasts beautifully against the grounded instrumentation. It’s not a song in the conventional sense; it’s closer to a moment of illumination — brief, soft, and quietly affecting.
Elsewhere, the album moves between hypnotic grooves and more abstract passages. Tracks stretch out, unfurl, and sometimes dissolve entirely, trusting the listener to stay with them. This isn’t music for distraction or multitasking. It asks you to slow your breathing, to adjust your listening posture, to let time expand.
What makes Ancient Lights feel particularly resonant now is its refusal to hurry. In an era where even ambient music can feel engineered for productivity or mood-management, this record resists utility. It doesn’t want to optimise your day. It wants to share a space with you.
The production reinforces this ethos. Nothing is over-polished. Nothing feels forced into place. Instruments retain their physicality — you can sense fingers on strings, breath in the room, the subtle imperfections that signal life rather than design.
There’s also a philosophical undercurrent running through the album. The title references the old concept of “ancient lights” — the right to receive natural daylight without obstruction. It’s a fitting metaphor. This music feels like an argument for openness, for letting something intangible reach you without interference.
Ancient Lights is not an album that reveals itself fully on first listen. It unfolds over time, deepening as familiarity grows. It becomes less about individual tracks and more about atmosphere — a continuous landscape you return to, noticing new details each time.
This is slow listening in its truest form. Not passive. Not nostalgic. But attentive.
In the context of listening culture, this album makes quiet sense. It belongs in rooms where sound is allowed to settle. Where records are played from beginning to end. Where listening is treated as an act, not a backdrop.
Ancient Lights doesn’t chase relevance. It creates stillness.
And in that stillness, it offers something increasingly rare — a feeling of being gently held by sound, rather than pushed along by it.
Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters.
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