The album began in 2009, when Belgian filmmaker Alexis Destoop asked Oren Ambarchi and Stephen O'Malley to score his short feature, "Kairos." Randall Dunn was their first and best choice to record and co-produce the music. With guitars, drums, analog synthesizers, vibes, crotales, Sruti box and a mellotron, deep emanations were evoked, while other spirits emerged from the old wooden sound panels in the room. Joined by Tor Deitrichson (tabla), Ai Aso (percussion) and Denis Kostromitin (violin). From the top, "Shade Themes From Kairos" is resonant as a collective inquest in sound, with all the players deeply immersed within the panorama they are creating. Shade Themes from Kairos includes a gorgeous metal-plated drone, the sort of 21-minute electric yogic saga you might expect from the triumvirate responsible for this five-track album. Though Stephen O Malley, Randall Dunn, and Oren Ambarchi have exhausting rosters of collaborations and contributions, their respective drone-and-doom credits remain preeminent for many. O Malley, for instance, is best known for co-founding the metal monolith Sunn O))), a band that Dunn not only records in the studio but engineers and mixes on the stage, too, serving as a shadowed albeit essential auxiliary member. Ambarchi, an Australian multi-instrumentalist with an insatiable taste for new musical idioms and approaches, seems to release another album every quarter; still, to casual listeners, hes most associated with powerful contributions to the most recent Sunn O))) albums or, at best, a set of LPs released through the bands own Southern Lord mothership a decade ago. So, then, Shade Themes satisfies its stylistic prerequisites by closing with Ebona Pagoda, an ultra-coruscant reduction of the epics that shape as Sunn O)))s core. Gently distorted guitars hang like fog over oscillating peals of organ. When those sounds intersect at just the right angle, the hum breaks through the amplified haze like sunlight, the solitary beams refracted into infinity.