The origin of the term “thin place” can be traced to Celtic/Christian culture, and a rough definition might be a location that exists as a conduit or gateway between the immediate world and a metaphysical, ethereal realm right next to it. However, the location of any given thin place is a bit harder to pin down, since a thin place tends to “exist” both subjectively and globally, beyond boundaries and nationalities. But it’s as much an uncanny feeling about a place as it is the place itself, a sensation of other lives having passed through a place but possibly still existing in it as trace element and shadow. A nexus of the real and the imagined, a simultaneity of the is, the was, and the may be.

In a way, Iranian musician and composer Siavash Amini’s latest album, Eidolon, released on Lawrence English’s brilliant and unstoppable label Room40, is a musical thin place – a space in which Amini explores the 13^th century tuning systems of Safi-al-din Urmavi, while hoping to capture a glimpse of any nascent wraiths or eidolons that might be found there. As a result, Eidolon is brimming with seething, visionary music and suggestions of all sorts of presences, both real and imaginary.

The opening track, “Ortus,” erupts like a malevolent creature disturbed from its sleep, spraying out a shifting miasma of enmeshed textures that sound like slithering tentacles, sibilant whispers, and wordless curses. The imprecations fade quickly, revealing cavernous, silty spaces girded by chest-thrumming bass. An uneasy drift across this liminal zone lands the listener in a soft and unexpected silence. Densely braided chords slowly emerge from that, chords that radiate and modulate, shine and shudder, and sound as if they’re issuing from enormous, rusting pipe organs. The chords eventually settle into throbbing drones for the remainder of the track’s duration, but the burning tension prevents any sort of hallucinatory transport one might associate with drone music. Instead, “Ortus” resolves itself in a truce between conflicting impulses, though it’s an uneasy truce at best.

“Instantia” begins with the throat-clearing, staticky sound of an electric organ wheezing into life, a gentle incursion of the tactile/real, and the suggestion of some sort of presence, at least human. A dark, glowering drone gets worked up, sounding like a chorus of demon-haunted bagpipes, before cutting out in a heart-stopping caesura. Into the airless absence, a high-pitched, drone-like cry presents itself, thick with the reedy sound of string instruments, but also sounding like a warning siren, putting the listener on notice. Amini surrounds the drone with a cycling, metallic moan, creating a sound both mournful and alien, and makes room for the two elements to twist and twine and infiltrate each other while maintaining their morphing identities.

The title of the final track, “Relictio,” refers to the recession of water from soil, a natural occurrence that leaves soil permanently exposed. The track opens with a dread-filled stasis, a foreboding, gestating combination of the strings and organs that have come before. A crackling sound, almost like thunder, splits the atmosphere and a cascade of hiss and static and feedback pours in, including a howling, panting pulse that sounds like a furious creature caught up in the outflow. Then: sudden silence, a stand-off of sorts, punctuated by short yelps and feints. Amini floods the new space with a welter of noise – riverbed drones, wall-to-wall rumbling, and, jostling on the surface of it all, a teetering, tuneless melody groaned out by what sounds like unhinged, swinging sheets of metal. (It’s hard to listen to this and not think of some of the recent terrifying and heart-rending footage of towns and cities all over the world that have been flooded; to see people instantly stripped of everything, to see motorhomes and cars and entire houses, objects heavy with meaning, reduced to rootless, lightweight trash and sent sailing.) The melee is gradually dialed down as a glowering, pulsing presence fills in and expands, clearing everything away except itself. But, mysteriously, the menacing presence becomes a retreating absence. In its retreat, the reliction begins, and a battered but ascendant series of notes ends the track, providing a fading if exhausted sense of relief.

Sometimes when you can’t find what you’re looking for, you wind up creating it yourself. What Amini has created on Eidolon – powerful, startling, deliriously overwhelming, and unexpectedly tender – might ostensibly work to open a space in which a spirit may appear, but it ultimately and convincingly proves to be the very spirit it seeks.