Build and release is one of the electronic artist’s primary tools. At its most obvious level, you have the drop – an element of a track by which it can live or die, both on the dancefloor and in its YouTube comments. Other examples are subtler – the persistent swell of something like Jon Hopkins’ ‘Open Eye Signal’, for instance; a recent pioneer in music who dissipates tension through rolling ebbs and flows. But Guy Andrews works at a smaller scale still.

Our Spaces takes build and release to its most micro level. Andrews' songs don’t ramp up anticipation to a point of intensity and give way into a huge, gratifying climax. Neither do they rise and fall with the stately pace of tides. Instead, he crams these transitions into mere seconds; periods as short as single bars, and with the frequency of waves hitting a shore.

He does this in two ways, both flowing from a sparse but bludgeoning approach to rhythm. The music is measured out by occasional, booming kicks. Sometimes the synths rise up to meet them and get cut dead by the count of a drum, only to start creeping back up immediately. Other times the rhythm splashes into the synths, sending out ripples of sound around it, in smaller and smaller echoes. It’s a great effect – the sounds panning towards you and receding into the distance like the slow, swoop of sirens.

One of the main strengths of Our Spaces is how skilful Andrews is in holding quite a few of these oppositions in balance. There’s the build and release. But there’s also the ambiguity of his synth tones – as much warm shafts of light, as they are cold, metallic sheens.

The synergy between electronic and live instrumentation is also strong. It’s not as if he just sticks a live rhythm section underneath his electronics. The lines are more blurred than that. The organic and inorganic elements swirl towards and away from the foreground with fluidity. The wooden percussion and tinkling hi-hats of ‘Bereft of Focus, Bereft of Will’ sparkle across the mix, seemingly out of nowhere; the melancholic melody of ‘In Autumn Arms’s guitar line offers a shimmering line of beauty against its empty backdrop.

For better or worse, Our Spaces more or less sustains its faintly menacing, mechanical mood for the duration of its running time. Occasionally, tracks like ‘Without Names’ hint at what he could do if he went more four to the floor; with its lurching groove of synths grinding over an uncharacteristically driving beat. This gestures towards a capacity for variety which might have been welcome to some listeners. But as an exercise in unbroken atmosphere, Our Spaces is a success in innovating around established juxtapositions: build and release; live sounds and electronics; shadows and light.