James Holden discovered trance states as a child, hammering out repetitive chords for hours on the piano. For Wacław Zimpel, Polish folk music and American blues offered early glimpses of higher states of consciousness. Since those introductory ear- and mind-openers, the search for musical transcendence has guided both artists in their respective journeys. Holden began his career as a teenager playing capital-T trance music—gated chord stabs, energy-stoking snare rolls, backmasked cymbals, the whole kit and caboodle—before drifting into increasingly woolier strains of ambient techno and electronic improv, including latter-day krautrock, homages to Terry Riley, and pan-global folk music that calls to mind benevolent UFOs hovering above Stonehenge. Zimpel, a clarinetist by training, has moved through free jazz, Indian Carnatic music, and even a 2020 collaboration with Shackleton, the dubstep convert turned arpeggiator shaman. What the two men’s work shares is an attentiveness to the minutiae of change, and a propensity for sequences that churn like thunderheads on the prowl.

Holden and Zimpel first linked up in 2018, recording together in the British musician’s London studio on a handful of dates—connected by a string of gigs featuring the clarinetist as a member of Holden’s touring ensemble, the Animal Spirits. The collaboration yielded the appropriately named Long Weekend EP, four tracks of rippling pulses and drones built up in live overdubs of reeds and modular synthesizer, one song per day. They return now with The Universe Will Take Care of You, a six-track, 51-minute album that feels bigger and more consequential in every way, folding more ideas, intensities, moods, and dimensions into its freeform sprawl.

Each of the six tracks is tagged with the date of its creation, a neat bit of marginalia that gives us some idea of how the sessions unrolled. The album begins on July 19, 2022, their third consecutive day of recording, at which point they were well and truly cooking. After a brief, breath-catching introduction that faintly recalls the vocoded lead-in to Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman”—and given the title, “You Are Gods,” the reference may not be entirely coincidental—they explode into action, unleashing volley after volley of rapid-fire arpeggios that move far too fast for mere mortals to parse. (Thirty-second notes? Sixth-fourth notes? Your guess is as good as mine.) Burbling and twisting, branching and recombining, they change color as they go, arpeggios erupting out of arpeggios, like jets of water in an illuminated fountain. Holden is credited with “arpeggio clouds,” Zimpel with alto clarinet, organ, and “grains,” but which sounds belong to whom is anyone’s guess—the thrill of the thing is in its overwhelming totality. Occasionally, an accidental melody asserts itself in a sequence of notes that somehow, by some miracle of filtering and timbre, breaks through the blur, but it’d be impossible to track every voice, much less every note; it’s enough to let it all wash over you, a jacuzzi for the mind.

The album shifts gears on track two, “Sunbeam Path,” recorded some six weeks later, on their penultimate day of sessions. Tinged with tremolo, Zimpel’s lap steel sets a luminous, liquid scene that brings to mind a particularly honeyed strain of krautrock, bent notes and erratic tape playback lending complexity to the Neu!-inspired drones. Horn-like squiggles add movement and tonal interest; the semblance of a beat eventually reveals itself inside a lattice of shakers and bells, then dissolves, returning the song to its broad, featureless ambient horizons.

The rest of the album shuttles between these two poles. “Sparkles, Crystals, Miracles” (give them credit for committing to the bit) is another wide-eyed sun salutation, kalimba-like harp plucks and strummed violin ducking through whooshing side-chain compression; the animating opposition here is that between the identifiable and the blurred, bringing to mind the tension between suggestive detail and gestural smear in some of Gerhard Richter’s paintings. “Incredible Bliss,” from their first day in the studio, is an ecstatic fugue for double-piped alghoza flute and 16th-note synth chords, probably the closest thing on the album to Holden’s previous work; what dazzles here is the dance between flute and synth, the way each one uses repetition to trick the other into moving forward, egging each other on as they bob rapturously in place. “Time Ring Rattles” is the album’s most thrilling track, a jumble of percussive phrases that clatters like a rock tumbler gone haywire, spilling brightly colored baubles as it spins. In a coincidence that reveals the depth of their shared interests, both musicians have performed with Moroccan Gnawa ensembles, and in “Time Ring Rattles” you can hear them searching for ways to unlock some of the polyrhythmic mysteries they’ve absorbed in their respective travels.

The credits suggest how playful the sessions must have been: Alongside the expected instruments and sounds (bells, electric piano, alto clarinet, Prophet synth) are instruments and techniques like walnuts, “blue noise,” “bucket brigades,” teacup. For all their complexity, these tunes are never difficult; they move with fluid grace and joy, buoyed by the revelatory power of mutual surprise. Nowhere is that more evident than in the 10-minute title track, which closes the album. A halting reed loop (or, at the credits would have it, “eternal pitch-gate loops of alto clarinet”) squeaks like a screen door over a thrumming synthesizer pulse. More phrases join in—bells, breaths, rustling noises, so many brightly colored ribbons of tone that the stereo field soon resembles prayer flags fluttering in the wind, patterns upon patterns upon patterns. Zimpel has called trance “the state of mind in which time bends”; one of the ways to achieve that state, he says, is via repetition. “After many repetitions I stop thinking… and I become equally listener and player. Eventually I have the feeling that I am disappearing.” That’s exactly what happens to me here: Try as I might, I find it impossible to follow the music’s changes with my conscious mind, but I am borne along anyway, weightlessly.