After last year’s Astral Pastoral grounded Stephen Bradbury’s Black Tempest project in earthbound mysticism, Folding Space charts a very different trajectory, this time hurtling headlong into the furthest reaches of kosmische sound.
Where Astral Pastoral was rooted in landscape and atmosphere, this record feels like it belongs to the star maps, with Bradbury navigating new dimensions of modular synthesis and celestial guitar haze.
Joining him on the voyage is percussionist Nick Raybould (Thought Bubble, Artifacts & Uranium), whose live drumming and rhythmic textures anchor the album with a pulsing, human heartbeat. As Raybould does with most of the projects he’s associated with, he also did the great cover art.
The interplay between machine and flesh gives Folding Space its propulsion: modular synths spiraling outward, cosmic drones bending time, guitars shimmering in orbit, all driven forward by Raybould’s insistent momentum.
Pressed fittingly on “Deep Space Black” vinyl, the album channels the classic kosmische lineage of Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze but refuses to be a retread. Bradbury pushes deeper into his modular experiments, carving vast corridors of sound that feel at once infinite and tactile.
There are moments of eerie stillness that echo the void, and others where the drums crash like solar storms against the ship’s hull.
With Folding Space, Black Tempest reasserts himself as one of the most compelling contemporary voices in U.K. kosmische, mapping the unknown with both reverence for the tradition and a restless urge to expand it.
This is not background ambience. It’s a bad-ass deep-space voyage, a narrative of sound where every pulse, sweep, and shimmer carries you further from the known world into the mysteries of the cosmic beyond.
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