While Beatless is devoid of a kick drum, it is not entirely arrhythmic. There are occasional bits of hi hat, or the noticeable angles of a looped sequence, or even an oscillating pattern that pulses in time. In this way, it almost sounds as if Substak is at odds with his music, and rather than creating it wholesale, he is actually conjuring up elemental forces and doing his best to rein them in. What we're left with is all cold - cold sheets of droning fog that hint at icy dub-inspired chord structures buried beneath them, cold track titles that separate any artistic intent from the sound you hear and replace it with a simple number. Cold silence before, between and after tracks, itself a black nameless void that Substak lures his sounds out of before marking them as his own and exiling them back to wherever they came from.
The limited edition CD-R includes a special 17 minute Coppice Halifax remix as a bonus track.
