About The Precious Dark

The Precious Dark is the newest collaboration by Ambient Electronic artists David Helpling and Eric “the” Taylor. These seven pieces revel in the exploration of the unknown, and launch both artists into uncharted creative territory. Taylor’s fervent analog synthesizers, Helpling’s ethereal guitar and cinematic vistas are here, but The Precious Dark is more wistful and moody than their previous efforts. Sparse expanses stretch, making emotive climaxes all the more sweeping; and therein lies the theme of The Precious Dark: that in a realm of alluring shadow, those rare moments of finding are colossal, that brilliant ecstasy means all the more when held beside the austere ambience of a world in half light.

The tracks unfold contemplatively as the album is discovered. The opening track The Space Between Atoms begins in a nebulous expanse before a propulsive beat launches through the darkness, star-bright chimes evoking Vangelis as it rockets into the beyond. Then, everything cosmic recedes into a gentle piano melody, all that wonder pulled down to earth. Cavernous Heart flows from absence to elegy, as soft piano carries the piece from a gentle drone to a brilliant symphonic finale. It holds in its empty spaces the weight of memory, the defiant belief that in the face of loss, time shared is without regret. The Ice Has Dreams begins swirling and ominous, its subterranean snarl unspooling like a deadly fractal, before sparse piano lifts the piece into a dimensional serenity.

Throughout this work, introspectiveness gives way to monumental eclipses that yet again dissolve into spacious resolve. Like our universe in the Big Bang: once nowhere, then everywhere, the fast sudden pervasiveness of AI technology impacted the approach to The Precious Dark. Helpling and Taylor, in response, created an album bereft of inorganic beings, expressed with wood & wire instruments and vintage analog synthesizers. Electric guitars, electrified pianos and analog synthesizers were treated with a barrage of effect pedals and recorded through an analog mixing console. While there is no shortage of endless reverb tails and modulating echoes, this is a work of hands-on experimentation and in the moment creation.

Taylor’s fervent analog synthesizers, Helpling’s ethereal guitar and cinematic vistas are here, but together, David Helpling and Eric Taylor have created something emotive and beautiful, something intimate and immediate: a haven of stillness in our ever-accelerating world.