BT — Between Here and You (Review)
I wasn’t expecting to be back here so early. Exploring the realms of BT’s non-dance focused music is always an enjoyable time. It’s been a riotous few years for the electronic music virtuoso, a time that happens as a result of patience and focus. It’s been six years since BT’s last club-focused album A Song Across Wires released in 2013. The last time we waited this long for something similar, we got These Hopeful Machines. Instead, we’ve seen a loose string of various club tracks released that keep him occasionally getting some love from the club music world, and he’s seemingly been way more focused on getting other passion projects out the door at last. In 2015, the Electronic Orchestra album shipped, fulfilling some life long dream adjustments to BT’s most renowned works, colliding the electronic with the symphonic in ways that don’t just remake the tracks, many of them are enhanced. It’s a crying shame to both forms of music that this hasn’t found a buyer to put it on the road yet. Transforming the electronic into the orchestral has seen great success, but the fusion concert still seems a way off.
A year later in the fall, BT released the “Underscore” project / album (“_”), which I reviewed back then and considered it a wonderful collection of personal musical life journals and potentially unreleased soundtrack projects that never made the cut. And earlier this year, in January, All Hail the Silence finally released their eternally awaited album, Daggers, recorded entirely without computers and fulfilling another lifelong dream for BT. Daggers performed tribute to BT and Christian Burns’s 80s new wave heroes, then BT and Christian Burns got to go on tour with one of those heroes, Howard Jones. After a summer of touring in what must feel like a teenager’s wildest dreams, it’s a little crazy to think that BT is churning out not just one, but two more albums for us to enjoy all before 2019 ends. But it’s happening, and we’ve already got one of them right now. Some may ask why, after six years, we haven’t seen another club music album ala These Hopeful Machines or A Song Across Wires since we’ve seen BT pushing out new collaborations with the likes of Ferry Corsten, Markus Schulz, and Armin van Buuren this year as well. Your guess is as good as mine, but Between Here and You, there’s about to be a lot of music from BT to listen to in the meantime.
Between Here and You isn’t too hard an album to place if one were to try and categorize some of BT’s works. He may be an artist that blends and bends sub-genres till you can’t quite place them anymore, but the broader strokes of his focus is easy to catch. The stuff made that plays with club genres is going to be a dance album. The stuff that features beats but also features 12–15 minute tracks with those beats and organic synthetic designs are his transcendent electronica that explore a lot of ideas at whatever pace BT decides. And then there’s BT building his ambient and meditative stuff, which sometimes does fall straight over into his “This Binary Universe” projects from time to time (see: Chromatophore, Five Hundred and Eighty Two), but this stuff has mostly been relegated to his Morceau Subrosa album, an abstract continuous mix of an album that blended together a lot of angelic big vibes all at once. Between Here and You, being only the second of its kind to be sold to the world from BT, is thus kind of hard to place or discuss. We don’t have a lot to compare it to and we don’t have a lot of reference material to say, “Yeah this is what BT seems to be setting out to accomplish this time around”. The CD copy of the album doesn’t even come equipped with a booklet or much to break down some of the backgrounds of each track like some other albums have had in the past. No AMA discussion (yet), no interview (yet), just a 10-track 53 minute collection of really unique chill-out pieces that moves pretty seamlessly from start to finish. And yet, I think the individuality is actually the point of strength here.
Between Here and You definitely does feel like each track has distinction. Morcea Subrosa has that starry night piano opener piece, but everything afterwards is a vibe that you mainly feel is shifting and moving organically and invisibly. It’s like day turning to night without you even noticing the whole way through. Between Here and You, however, is a segmented day/night meditation that lets you know when things have changed without having to scream it into your face. You just subtly catch things changing around you as each track quickly explores an idea, iterates that idea once or twice, and then moves onwards. And I think that actually plays to BT’s strengths here.
We start on “Transmission”, a synthy light piece that plays some hodgepodges of high organic notes that I can only describe as a mixture of Close Encounters of the Third Kind with “Silent Sorrow in Empty Boats” by Genesis. Right off the bat this album makes me struggle to compare it to anything out there like BT usually accomplishes. Photosynthetic seems to blend low frequency clicks and warps against growing warm mid flares that imitate Ben Babbitt’s “Kentucky Route Zero” electronic-elements well while some lighter pads dart around the soundscape. The only other way I can describe it to you is comparing it to the audio experience of listening to plants absorbing dew and growing towards the sun, set to the scope of ants observing this as some sort of majestic impossibility. And just like that five minutes have passed and track two is over.
Not all feels genuinely inspired or magically fascinating, “Akebonika” is a lot of growing noise but not much more than that. “Subroutine” feels like a revised and altered form of “If/Then” (more on that one later). And despite its nine minute runtime that passes in a flash (not complaining about that), “Metamorphic” is mostly a glitchy light show in a dark echochamber. It’s cool, but not necessarily trying to be deep or exploratory. At least, that’s what I thought on my first three listens. It felt like an improvised session spent carefully touching and adjusting synth racks, which is honestly really cool if true. Then when I re-visited the track on a pair of higher-range open back headphones and could suddenly feel what BT was doing, my perspective shifted. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard such defined emptiness and “sound death” as you can hear on “Metamorphic” as some signals cross the threshold of no longer being something you can hear, but you can definitely feel the sound “dying” thanks to the carefully placed backing rumbles to define the edges of the cave. Or maybe those sounds aren’t actually going away, they’re just…morphing into something silent. You can feel the shape of this chamber change as sound is added and subtracted, grows and recedes. And yet one can easily miss it all if you don’t have a great listening environment: A quiet room, some quiet time, and a good pair of headphones that allow you to hear these things. It’s a razor’s edge that something so interesting like this can easily be missed if you just aren’t listening to it in a way that enables you to actually “see” it.
So BT’s album is still another BT album. Lots of stuff to explore if you pay attention, easily entertaining even when you’re not, and worth listening to on various headphones. One or two tracks you may not love, so what’s the special catch here? None of these tracks are bad on paper, nor does BT fail at execution here or anything. I do think it’s safe to say that veterans of BT’s works are going to sometimes expect more depth, nuance, and mental stimulation out of this work, just like any of them. BT has pretty much always delivered on this front as a complex artist, but beat-less chill out music chills you out, it doesn’t actively stimulate your brain quite in the same way any other music will. By that observation, it’s hard to “discuss” some of the tracks on this album. And it’s hard to adjust for people who might expect something “more”. There’s no one at fault here, it just requires a different approach. Potentially, a more introspective one. Let’s try it.
When BT’s changing it up and exploring something new here, typically some of the shortest tracks on this album, things feel really pleasant and unique and you almost want to spend a year in that sound. They are peaceful moments of introspection. I found this especially true on tracks like “If/Then” and “The Obstacle is the Way”. The strengths in these numbers come from chords and their progressions or alterations. “If/Then” almost entirely functions off of the gentle shifting between two different notes and the timing of those shifts, which I would guess were programmed on “If/Then” functions. The subtle cut of the mid-band in the EQ on certain notes, and how they still maintain their vibrancy thanks to the ambience and reverb filling the space of this album create a unique atmosphere. It’s a beautiful sequence I could just loop for an hour and call it a day. “The Obstacle is the Way” is a two and a half minute closely recorded acoustic and vocal piece that I want to last forever. It features vocal samples spliced and turned into an ambience of breaths in similar ways he did on the exclusive third disc of These Re-I-Magined Machines that forever changed me, that moment in particular that I can’t explain, you’d just have to hear the warmth of the voices that were split into millions of pieces and morphing into each other. Similar things are done here. Gentle bird chirps, a sound that I still can’t figure out if it’s a slowed down and sonically reduced old clock ticking or the slowness of BT’s fingers moving up and down the strings on that guitar he’s playing through this number, all guided by the piano piece taking front and center make “The Obstacle is the Way” the most beautiful Sunday morning daybreak I think I’ve heard in musicality. And it’s 2:34 long.
Meanwhile, the other tracks on this album aren’t introspective moments of peace so much as introspective moments of emotional breakthrough that BT is taking you through, especially on “Chromatography” and “Sunfall”. “Chromatography” spends half of its runtime creating somber vibes out of vocalizing and darker noir 80s soundtrack synths before a piano piece in the middle paints a mood of emotional resolution and self motivation. The piano lifts you while everything surrounding it pulls downwards. And while I’m confident BT’s got plenty more going on that makes this effect work, you can feel what the track is doing in simple terms. Voices = sorrowful. Piano = carrying. “Sunfall” carries similar feelings of an emotional breakthrough teetering on the edge of some awful tragedy as the sun sets. Swirling highs are bolstered by warm key presses while a cold-as-winter-wind string is pulled and pushed with what sounds like some really crafty distortion to make sure that bitter cut the string gives is in place to ensure the cross section of emotions at play here aren’t lost. It’s a layered emotionally resonant experience. And then the album fades us out on a revamped and revisited version of “Tabular Sarsa(λ) Algorithm No. 13" from Morceau Subrosa, named “Slow Motion and Harmonics”. While “Sunfall” carries the emotional climax of the album, this last track is an interesting denouement that almost seems to revert listeners back to Morceau Subrosa, setting up what feels like some sort of a prequel experience at play. It was weird, and interesting. Much like the rest of this album.

It took a couple listens, but I’m prepared to say I really enjoy Between Here and You, more than Morceau Subrosa. And it definitely feels like the best chillout thing BT has done to date. And I’d like to see him do more of it.
Now let’s talk about that individualism and its effectiveness. Like some of BT’s best works, Between Here and You “moves” quickly, despite some tracks reaching nine minutes in length. The difference here is that it’s a little bit easier to feel engaged with this album compared to Morceau Subrosa due to the individuality of these tracks. I said earlier that some of the shortest ideas at play are the ones you want to stay the longest here, and BT is someone who has rarely built an album or track that accomplishes something to that effect. He’s always been the long-form-mix person. His albums have almost always been mixed to reward those who like longform breakdowns, movements, and different pieces to form a whole that are better enjoyed together instead of apart. This has created the idea that BT doesn’t hold to conventions that listeners must be fed simple and quick ideas in musical form. But here, my favorite stuff on this album cuts in under the 6-minute mark a majority of the time. And they’re not simple, but they certainly catch me simply. What does this mean?
Underscore gave us the opportunity to appreciate and digest micro-movements while maintaining that whole album experience at play. Morceau Subrosa is an album built to be listened to as one 45 minute meditative experience. We’ve seen both sides of the extreme. Here, BT’s strings of ideas are carefully mixed so that each one does move into the next, but not without ever feeling like one is without the others, it allows listeners to pick up the individual tracks and explore them as ideas of their own. It’s maybe one of the more pliable designs BT has ever applied to an album that is, by design, a lot more abstract for him. And that’s a really smart move honestly. Of all of BT’s albums out there, Morceau Subrosa probably grabbed the smallest amount of sales and listens because the abstract-ness of it all made it a bit of work for some of his fans to digest. Underscore faced similar problems when people were listening to the micro-movements for Artifacture, Indivism, and Ohm out of order.
I’m a big fan of albums and album experiences, it’s part of why I started making mixes. And BT makes the most rewarding album experiences I’ve ever found. But, now BT has made his most approachable abstract work ever, solving his problem of finding ways to enable active listening in the genre that oftentimes does the opposite all to the tune of “it’s okay if you just want to listen to this one track forever”. I gotta say I’m quite the fan of BT striking up a chill out album that feels closer to the scattered moment-to-moment visual storytelling of “The Lamb Dies Down on Broadway” (by Genesis) instead of another “Nursery Cryme” or “Selling England by the Pound” (also by Genesis). Big albums like the one that BT is releasing later this year take a lot of time, effort, and time. And while “Between Here and You” probably wasn’t done in just a month, because BT never lets himself simplify things, he’ll certainly find favor in finding ways to make his abstract complicated albums approachable on micro-levels that can be digested as individually just as well as fully. Giving niches an easier route for people to find is a good thing for everyone.
With that, Between Here and You is something I wholeheartedly recommend. It’s an introspective chill out experience that balances grabbing your attention and letting you just be really well. If you’re not certain how you feel about the album, try “The Obstacle is the Way” or “If/Then”. The album is available on practically every platform for streaming, downloading, or buying, and either one of those tracks won’t take you very long to hear. It’s worth your time, worth your nice headphones, and worth some guided introspection.
