Vin Downes & Tom Eaton: Until The Light Was Gone
Vin Downes & Tom Eaton

Listeners who cottoned to Robin Guthrie's memorable Darla collaborations with Harold Budd (e.g., Bordeaux, 2011) will find much to admire about this joint effort from ambient artist Tom Eaton and guitarist Vin Downes. Until The Light Was Gone is the sound of the lauded finger-style player being drawn into Eaton's Sounds &Substance lair and embedded within his atmospherically sculpted soundscapes. Drenched in reverb, Downes's guitars merge with the keyboards, basses, and programming Eaton uses to build his oceanic settings. It's relatively new territory for Downes, but you'd never know it from how smoothly his sounds fold into Eaton's, and as if his guitars aren't enough, Eaton adds some of his own (one additional change-up occurs when Jeff Oster contributes flugelhorn to “Kaleidoscope”).

Fourteen co-credited pieces appear, and while some might identify as formal compositions sprinkled with recurring themes, many register as atmospheric settings that flood the aural space for three to five minutes at a time with teeming layers of acoustic, electric, and electronic elements. The Grammy-nominated Eaton's a master of production design and brings all of his customary sound artistry to the project.

Swathed in reverb, Downes's gorgeous tone is front and centre on the shimmering “Dawn Delayed,” its peaceful, soothing tone establishing the album's character immediately; there's a powerful emotional pull too in its elegiac expression. Perhaps the set's most memorable composition, “Automat” comes next, its subtly insistent rhythm bolstered by percussive accents and its identity marked by an acoustic piano earworm. As Downes weaves blues-tinged phrases into the arrangement, Eaton's production wizardry gives the material a multi-dimensionality that makes it seem exponentially grander. Crisp, gentle grooves likewise animate “The Weight of Your Whisper,” “A Sign,” and “The Clearing,” with crystalline guitar textures and piano chords intoning alongside the seductive snap of their rhythms. The latter two also convincingly approximate live quartet performances when guitars, keyboards, bass, and drums present swoon-inducing instrumentals of no small impact (“A Sign” and “A Shadow in the Window” could even pass for downtempo post-rock exercises).

June 2026