It is a very different record from its predecessor, though the same hands are at the controls. The Novation Circuit Tracks and Roland MC-707 do the heavy lifting, with Bitwig effects, the Vital synthesizer and a stash of XLN drum sounds completing the palette, all of it assembled on Linux. Those are modest tools by the standards of the modern bedroom studio, and the modesty is instructive. The EP demonstrates, over and over, that a limited kit in the hands of someone with something to say will outrun a limitless one operated by someone with nothing. The artist, characteristically, puts it more simply in the notes: lots of reverb, hahaha. Lots of reverb is exactly what one gets, and it is glorious.

That reverb is the record's defining gesture. It swells around each beat like breath on a cold window, turning kicks into distant thuds and synth lines into apparitions. The drums have a lovely, weary thump, the sound of a heart that has been through the worst and keeps time regardless. Melodies surface briefly, hang in the murk, then dissolve, as memories do at three in the morning. The artist files the music under the headings CHURCH_OF_GLITCH and NIGHTMARE_SEQUENCE, and the labels fit. There is an ecclesiastical hush to the way these tracks are constructed, a cathedral built from static and low frequencies, with glitches flickering through it like candle flames in a draught.

The influences are a tidy map of the dark-electronic underground: monomorte, White Ring, Semicolon and Flesh. One hears their shared appetite for gloom, for slowed tempos and smudged edges, for beauty that has been left out in the rain. Yet Innocent Darkness never sounds like a copyist. Where his heroes can lean toward the icy and remote, he is warmer, more human, and the fingerprints on the machines are audible.

What gives the EP its weight is the story behind it, which the artist tells without decoration. He lost his mother, then his father a year later, and his message to listeners is plain: life can be incredibly hard, but the light is always there, and there is no shame in asking for help. It is a sentiment that could curdle into cliché in lesser hands. Here it does not, because the music refuses to lie. The darkness is real, thick and unhurried, and the light, when it comes, arrives as a slow brightening at the edges of a track, earned rather than announced. His own summary, "dark stuff, but light I love", is as neat a review as any critic could hope to write.

There is generosity in the enterprise, too. Every album sits free on Bandcamp, offered to what the artist calls like-minded people, and the motive is stated without a trace of calculation: fun, a hobby, and the hope of playing live in Europe one day. One hopes he gets there. These are pieces built for a dark room and a shared pulse, and they would gather force in front of an audience, bass pressing against the ribcage while the reverb hangs in the air above.

*VOIDWALKER* is a small, sincere and deeply felt piece of work, made in a house full of memories by a man who has decided that sorrow and joy are best played through the same speakers.

Find a pair of good headphones, dim the lights, and let it wash over you. You may leave feeling a little lighter than when you arrived, which is more than most records manage.