Both Ilyas Ahmed and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma are multifaceted musicians with long histories of varying approaches to ambient-adjacent sounds. Though both have discographies dotted with minor releases and one-offs, they each reached new levels of clarity and vision around the same time; Ahmed with the washed-out vocals and acoustic guitar-driven songwriting of his 2018 album Closer to Stranger and Cantu-Ledesma with the floating chamber pop of his brilliant 2019 set Tracing Back the Radiance. You Can See Your Own Way Out, the first collaborative work from Ahmed and Cantu-Ledesma, makes an about-face from the pristine sounds of those albums, building a sonic picture that's dense, murky, and swamp-like. This begins immediately with the field recordings of night-time insects and distant rumbles of guitar tones on album-opener "Never Sleep at Night." Heavily processed acoustic and electric guitar lines bump into each other without ever locking into a theme, with the sound of crickets and the occasional tape malfunction sometimes becoming louder than the instruments. This track splits into two completely different movements, fading into the distortion-shrouded "Dark from Daybreak" after waves of formless synth, guitar, and more natural sounds orbit each other for several minutes. The various pieces explore different instrumentation. The beautifully minimal "Moon on the Lake" is made up of warbly guitar figures captured on hissy cassette, "Black Across White" pairs mournful piano and guitar, and "Mr. Sophistication" goes so far as to include buried, reverb-coated vocals and drum-machine pulses among its romantic FM synths. The more structured moments are broken up by stabs of noisy, abstract texture, but the duo's tendency to get into wildly different styles on almost every track never jars the flow of the album. Both Ahmed and Cantu-Ledesma are masters of restraint, and the various muddy experiments of You Can See Your Own Way Out unfold like a slow-moving guided tour of a long-abandoned mansion. We're moved through each room -- some are waterlogged or have large holes in the walls exposing the wilderness outside. Other rooms were once used for opulent celebration, years of dust now gathering on the chandeliers. Ahmed and Cantu-Ledesma quietly walk us through the various places of the album at a slow, deliberate pace, always pointing out where to watch our step before gently ushering us into the next atmosphere.