A few seconds of nothing come first — real silence, room-quiet — and then plucked strings, quick and light, a thin bright step out of the dark. A small woodwind, flute-like and close, is there almost at once, woven into the plucks so tightly the two read as one texture. By 0:08 that plucked figure has become a grid: a tick the ear can stand on, though it never pushes. There is no drum and no real low end — the only percussion here is the string being plucked — so the body gets caught in a light lock, a swaying capture rather than anything that demands movement. Pulse and warmth come from the same instruments.

The step itself has a curious quality: the attacks don't land square. They roll across the beat, leaning a little ahead and behind, so the pocket deforms even as it stays perfectly usable. And nothing breaks. From half a minute in, the piece keeps one continuous state for nearly its whole length — swells gather in the strings, warmth rises a step, then settles back down, over and over, each phrase ending in a small falling gesture, an exhale rather than a cadence.

Around 2:22 voices enter and the sound thickens: a soft chorus sits right in the strings' register, blended to the point of reading as another orchestral section rather than singers out front. Two speeds open up — the chorus breathes in long sustained lines while the plucks tick quickly beneath — and the piece becomes a held, hovering thing, weight suspended rather than driven. The voices rise together near 2:45, then sink back, and woodwinds ease into the space they leave, the frontline rotating hands without the underlying step ever changing its job.

That rotation is the drama the piece allows itself. The middle minutes don't transform; they deepen. Near 4:00 a sustained choral line floats above what has become a firmly marching pizzicato, and a few beats later the harmony spreads open into the richest stretch of the whole recording — the fullest the texture ever gets, which is still gentle. Every swell from here pays back only what it borrowed: releases land as modest settlings, never as drops. The consistency starts to feel ceremonial, the way a music box or a processional keeps its step because keeping it is the point.

The leave-taking is prepared as slowly as everything else. The chorus returns once more around 5:07, swells gently near 5:22, and then begins a long, unhurried descent — the whole vocal mass gliding down through 5:30 — before thinning into the orchestral backdrop, the last voice somewhere around 6:10. After that it's subtraction all the way: strings fade until only faint room resonance remains near 6:15, and the plucked step, which has run without pause since the opening seconds, finally loosens around 6:38. The last fragments break apart in the final seconds, and by 6:48 there is true silence again.

It's an ending shaped like the opening returned to — but where the start used silence as preparation, this one uses it as destination. Nothing resolves with a gesture; the piece simply empties, step by step, voice by voice, until the tick that carried six minutes is the last thing to stop.