Looking back at David Hockney, who passed away earlier this year, and then at the liminal spaces of the Backrooms, we inevitably find ourselves returning to the solitude of Edward Hopper's paintings. Images from different eras reflect the same modern paradox: as life becomes ever more efficient and convenient, we find ourselves increasingly confined by loneliness and boredom, as though time itself has come to a standstill. Cultural time and our lived sense of time seem to stagnate, while social time rushes ever faster. Yet these precisely measured fragments of “empty time” continue to propel us forward.

Mark Fisher described this dislocation as: “Life continues, but time has somehow stopped.” Is time an order imposed by modernity, or a wandering ghost? Beyond the clock, how many layers of time can we hear? With this question in mind, we encountered three groups of musicians this year. Through sound, each weaves a different kind of “clock” — allowing time to shift and mutate through the body, and to take on new forms in the flow of listening.