Time Is Away: The Meditative Process

Image via Robin Silas Christian

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Jack Rollo and Elaine Tierney cut unassuming figures. Rollo is an art-school graduate and record-store employee who wears a quiet smile and thickly cut tortoiseshell glasses; Tierney, a design historian and lecturer, speaks with a quiet confidence as she draws lines between centuries of texts. In their independent work—Rollo in his weekly NTS residency and his mixes as Peace Pipe, Tierney in her writings—they regularly interlace the familiar and the uncanny, bridge gaps between artistic practices, and rummage around the dustbin of history until they find something new. As Time Is Away, they have spent the past ten-plus years honing this craft, and, in the process, have built something singular.

Rollo and Tierney first met roughly a dozen years ago, but beyond that, the details remain a bit contested. They worked in similar circles—Rollo in record shops, Tierney in women’s vintage clothing—and they cut their teeth DJing in indie clubs, spaces where it’s standard to play songs in full and melody is given top billing. Tierney used to put on club nights, and, one evening, she booked The Pastels, a Glaswegian rock group. Rollo claims they met then; Tierney “has no memory whatsoever of speaking.” (“I was busy!”) In either case, their relationship was built upon a mutual care for art, Rollo says. “We’d pass music back and forward; we’re both people for whom music means everything. Before Elaine, I had never met someone who I shared that with so definitely.” It wasn’t long before they moved in together, bumped into NTS founder Femi Adeyemi at a record shop, and started up Time Is Away: “Part soundscape, part essay for the radio.”

Time Is Away’s discography—a slowly accumulated pile of DJ mixes, compilations, singles, one-off tapes, and limited-run CDs—is as dense as it is spacious, a decade of ambient-not-ambient music built out of dust and debris. Their work is less bound to genre than it is to feeling; it is equally indebted to classical mythology, deep-dive indie rock, and ancient folk musics; it is equal parts collagery, psychedelia, and historiography. When exploring what makes their approach tick, Elaine bottles lightning: “It’s a statement [about] the importance of doubt. In many aspects of contemporary culture, you’re meant to have your quick-fire, shoot-from-the-hip, fully resolved opinions about things, and I just don’t trust that.” Their work is rarely any one thing, but it is frequently patient, meditative, and conscious of its own context; it is a music of busted keyboards and roughly plucked strings, a slow-motion tangling of timelines with no obvious end-point.

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With a project that wide-ranging, one of the toughest questions is also one of the simplest: How do you talk about it? Each member, perhaps unsurprisingly, offers up their own ideas. Speaking about a childhood spent making mixtapes, Rollo gestures towards a wide-ranging idea of psychedelia, pulling out a potential skeleton key to their approach in the process: “To me, what has always been really psychedelic is when you could listen to something a number of ways and it wouldn’t sound the same. Each time you come back to it, you don’t get to the bottom of it. Sometimes, that’s what I want [our sound] to be. Sometimes, I want it to be clear and lovely, but sometimes it should be about that feeling of not knowing.”

Rollo is a careful and considered speaker; as he lays out his sentences, you can practically hear the footnotes and caveats locking into place. He regularly defers to Elaine, his partner in art, music, and life, filling the blanks he’s comfortable with and leaving plenty unsaid. In a brief aside about H.P. Lovecraft, he gestured towards this approach: “If you keep adding to the information that you’re giving someone in order to tell them that you can’t give them information, it doesn’t work. Sometimes, you’ve got to face the fact that what Time Is Away is about is quite hard to talk about, so I don’t talk about it very often.”

A few weeks later, Tierney looks towards one of the dozens of books lining her office and hurls a gauntlet: “Have you read any Montaigne?” She’s referring to Michel de Montaigne, a French philosopher who, after forfeiting his position in Bordeaux’s political scene, locked himself in a tower with roughly 1,500 books and began to write. Essais, the fruit of that labor, is a conversational collection of meditations with titles like “On our Incapacity to distinguish Truth from Error” and “On Oracles.” The texts are wide-ranging and not particularly predictable, a style that speaks to Tierney’s own predilections. During her studies, Tierney was told off for “thinking in circles”—for noticing “not-obvious links between people, moods, visual and material culture” without presenting a deeply structured argument alongside. Speaking about her own thought processes, Time Is Away, and Montaigne at once, she sums it up with a smile. “Again, I like circles, not straight lines.”

That being said, there are throughlines. In recent years, their work has turned towards questions of political and social import; they frequently platform voices and texts which explore the ramifications of power, connecting long-gone civilizations to contemporary nations, drawing lines between slowly eroding ways of life and engineered gentrification. Tierney puts it simply: “You can’t understand London without understanding the rest of the world.” In her work as a historian of 17th and 18th-century London and in her DJ mixes, she makes a point of exploring those histories, often from a structural and logistical point of view. Thinking back through the archive, she names a few sessions as they come to mind: “There’s the program about the English garden, the program about landscape, the various programs we’ve done about London as a kind of center of global finance.”

Rollo points towards Docklands, a piece of theirs from 2018, as particularly important. In the special, which pairs interview snippets from the ‘80s with sacred music from the 12th century, they explored a question that is all too familiar: when a district becomes ripe for new developments, who controls the levers of power and who gets kicked out to make way? In reaching between seven centuries of artistic practice while drawing from the specific language of contemporary politics, they find a sort of quiet psychedelia—it is immediate and eternal, making the implicit argument that these sorts of things have been going on forever.

This question—of how power, and history, tumble unchecked into the present—comes up again and again in our conversations. When we speak, Tierney is midway through writing a book about 17th and 18th-century festivals. There’s celebrations for coronations, sure, but there’s people lighting bonfires on street corners, too. That quickly leads to, she says, “Quite Time Is Away questions. Who gets to put big, dangerous things in shared urban spaces? What does that tell us about asymmetries of power in those times and places?” She continues, unearthing a core bit about their work in the process: “I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m a historian of ‘un-architecture.’ I’m interested in all the structures, entities, and presences in the city that people who are proper architectural historians won’t go near. I’m not very interested in questions of aesthetics, or whether something is by someone who’s perceived to be important.” It lands as little coincidence that the strongest Time Is Away sets share this quality; if they are “about” anything, perhaps they are about putting the ancient and contemporary worlds in conversation with each other, one roughly hewn melody at a time. Or, to hear Tierney tell it: “We exist in an attic that’s full of all this classical junk, for better or worse.”

Given that approach, a new question emerges: how can one find meaning amidst all the junk? When asked to dig into what makes a Time Is Away set tick, they both reach towards the human voice. “For want of a better word,” Rollo says, his eyes sparkling behind his frames, “We’re interested in DIY culture. Both of us bonded over that approach to rock music in the ’80s and ’90s. There, the question is: What can you do with the tools you’ve got? You’ve almost always got your voice. It’s also a route out of the formalism of instrumental music and into content or meaning. Human voices make meaning in a much more straightforward way than guitars do.” Even their most austere releases demonstrate this interest: much of their is rooted in spoken word, recitations of texts, various definitions of “folk music,” or some combination thereof.

Tierney has a slightly different read, of course. “Ultimately,” she says, “I’m a social and cultural historian. I like a good story, and that’s often the best route into getting people to engage with these sorts of questions: power, resilience, the business of history that we keep coming back to. If there’s any sort of rule at play, though, it’s to not be too obvious. We do radio and sound-based work, but we keep on talking about things which are visual and material. It’s a quiet disruption: you’re listening to something which is about something you should be seeing. If it’s not too gauche to say it, those are the rules of Time Is Away.”

Recently—relatively speaking—Rollo and Tierney have moved towards more typical forms of curation. In 2022, they released Ballads, a compilation that expanded upon a cassette of the same name; in 2023, they followed it up with Searchlight Moonbeam and released an edit that put electronic-music experimentalists SSIEGE and Muslimgauze in conversation. In late March, they will follow those projects with The Wind That Had Not Touched Land, a record made alongside Félicia Atkinson, Maxine Funke, and Christina Petrie: a slow-motion pile-up of spoken word, folk musics, and world-weary ambient that Rollo and Tierney contributed to by, as Rollo puts it, “looping and layering in our usual way.”

Despite their formal distinctions—each compilation features a lessened emphasis upon spoken word and a heightened focus upon musical form, and the LP is their first exploration of that format—they are undoubtedly the work of the same act. With Ballads, they use the titular form as a jumping-off point, weaving between spindly jazz, bleary ambience, and star-kissed acoustic guitars; on Searchlight Moonbeam, they pull off a similar trick but turn the distortion up a notch. The Wind That Had Not Touched Land, in part thanks to Time Is Away’s collagery, feels ancient and modern at once, moving with an unrushed sensibility familiar to anyone who follows their radio show. A million lifetimes after their come-up in indie clubs, you can still hear their DIY approach echoing through their selections. It’s clear the group is still searching for something new, following their respective approaches down whatever rabbit holes they come across.

“When I made art in art school,” Rollo says near the end of our conversation, “I thought that you’ve got to have a way of doing something that’s interesting or new, and that you also have to have a thing you’re making that art about. We’ve stumbled upon both, and I want to keep going with it. There’s a methodology and a set of concerns which work for us at the moment, and hopefully that continues.” Tierney, for her part, asks who, exactly, would want to read something about them. This tracks: both she and Rollo are unerringly humble and soft-spoken, quick to temper any grandiose statements with a footnote or caveat. I’m not wholly certain, I say, but isn’t that discovery part of the joy? “As we discussed this afternoon,” Tierney says with a wry smile, “Not knowing is often a very valuable position to occupy.”

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