Isobel Ccircle~ - Asterism (Soft Bodies Records)

Welcome to space, a frankly terrifying place, as we know from tales of astronauts stranded Out There whilst rummaging around in our cosmic back yard. I regularly stand in my terrestrial one, watching the skies for signs of flying cutlery. I'm hoping that these 'subsonic elements' might, as is suggested, 'alter the chemical compositions and geological structures of the surrounding area' because our garden's a bit of a mess.

Space is a mess, or rather, a place of laws we have written in order to make sense of the universe but our imagination still takes hold, rendering anything possible. So April Larson and Matt Bower are 'translators for a mysterious entity known as Isobel Ccircle~ , not the creators of this music. And who are Isobel Ccircle~? When asked if they're human, the answer is 'Yes, but....' [audio is unintelligible, tape plays static].

Our musical interpretation of the universe has moved from Holst's suites to the lush theremin-lead romanticism of the 50s flying saucer craze and the mind-boggling reality of landing on the moon matched by mechanical music invention in the synthesizer. Rewinding in time Sun Ra, being from Saturn, could translate the signals his received into big band sounds, whilst soon after, Dissevelt & Baltan's ‎Song Of The Second Moon (1957 - 1961) set a precedent for electronic music to come. If space exploration had to follow a linear path, music did not, necessarily.

In space no-one can hear either your scream, or those beats you programmed as part of your space mythology. This may render half of the Underground Resistance catalogue meaningless, but we still love and need the mythology, don't we? Here's another but there are no beats. Instead, Astersim offers a static-filled sonic trip through dense black matter, drifting weightlessly yet something heavy always lurks on the edges. Is that voice on Event Horizon a message? If so, what's it saying?

I recently railed against somnambulistic Ambient music. Here we may dream but never doze off because despite meditative atmospherics the noise of chaos and menace of dark mysteries is ever present in these 'audio files'. Pressure Cracked Stars typically creates a mood filled with unknown forces; instability amid what appear, from our little rock, to be diamonds set in the black stone of space. We may be Here To Go, but this translation sounds a much like a warning as a welcome. Perhaps it's best to imagine outer space encounters rather than realise them and Asterism is as good a tool for doing that as any I've heard.  

There's also an excellent booklet to accompany the files. See the image below.

Buy it here