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This is a turbulent, violent track, each individual clatter and squeak jostling for space, everything clad in a thick armor of distortion. “The Story of My Ancestor the River” crashes through the middle of the album like the rotting floorboards of an attic suddenly giving way. This is ambient at its most horizontal, and you may wonder if Leeds hasn’t abandoned his usual curlicues to make something to sit back and float away on. The first three tracks average about 10 minutes in length, and none of them end up far from where they started, least of all opener “Dream Song of the Woman,” 11 minutes of the kind of billowing wind-tunnel noise Windy & Carl usually reserve for the depths of their own albums. Sweet was full of chattering, insectoid sounds that seemed to slither up the listener’s ear, but the impression on To All Sides is of an eerie, remote stillness.

To All Sides They Will Stretch Out Their Hands, the Kansas producer’s second album under the Pendant name, was made mere weeks after 2018’s Make Me Know You Sweet. Anything rhythmic is inevitably frayed, anything harmonic is buried in layers of digital wind, and the usual reassurances of ambient music no longer apply. His work as Pendant gets that out of the way in order to smear black paint across the canvas. throws us enough swooning pads and symmetrical kick drums to maintain at least some connection, however abstract, to the reassuring pulse of the club. Something insinuating and unsettling thrums beneath all of Brian Leeds’ work: a paranoid, minor-key mystery, as if leering pairs of eyes were emerging from the digital crackles and sub-bass swells that define his brand of ambient.