In music, form is sometimes deeply bound up with experience, speaking meaning more persuasively than words. On "After the Town was Swept Away," released after signing with Leaving Records, Tyler Gilmore, aka BlankFor.ms, has found a new vocabulary of self-collection within rhythm. Confronting both sorrow and joy, these twelve pieces built from tape-loop manipulation are adorned like garlands and resonate in a whisper. The imperfect circularity of the tape itself is both a metaphor through which this record meditates on time and the physical support that shapes its sound.

Two life-changing events followed one after another for the artist: the birth of his first child, Ellis, in November 2023, and the death of his mother in January 2024 after a two-year battle with cancer. The sound of "After the Town was Swept Away," made in their wake, was born of dismantling and reconstruction. The compositional process was largely one of revision: early drum machine sketches were emptied out and degraded, entire pieces were reassembled, tape loops were layered on top, and intricate rhythmic biographies were digested. BlankFor.ms' allegiance to the beat, rooted in his early experience with jazz and his long-held love of house and drum & bass, emerges in never-obvious ways, serving as a means of reinterpreting the era.

Wielding a lucid rhythmic language, the music of "After the Town was Swept Away" speaks in tones that are intense, loving, and at times uneasy. This is felt most deeply on the lead single "Formed by the Slide." Against an offbeat loop of quietly unhurried, multilayered sustained vocals by composer, vocalist, and friend Ella Joy Meir, the rhythm surfaces as a noisy swell, as if answering that achingly beautiful call. It is sound in its purest experiential form: when life speaks to us, we answer however we can.

"After The Town Was Swept Away" was born of love — not only gentle contemplation but communion actually felt. That holds true, for instance, of the triptych named after Kinship, a yoga studio in Highland Park. In 2024, experimental musician Colloboh invited BlankFor.ms to improvise alongside a routine by yoga instructor Meg Shoemaker, and three pieces emerged from it. But the influence of others is felt throughout the album, not only musically — as with jazz drummer Marcus Gilmore and pianist Jason Moran — but on a more personal level as well, all bound together by rhythm.

Isn't that so? Tape loops possess a strange power to preserve the past while simultaneously altering it, inscribing and erasing both sound and its source. The beats of "After the Town was Swept Away" are contemplative yet, happily, confront exactly that. Reconstructed rhythms make room for memories unexpected and even unwished-for, becoming a way to survive the flood of experience.