Field Lines Cartographer :: This Vibrating Earth (Castles in Space)

FLC pushes the sonic envelope into more atomically intense innerscaping; couched as it is in sprawling tracts from brooding pulse (“Still Canyon”) to queasy drones (“Hypogeum”), chthonic atmo (“Thawing Ice Temples”) to percolating celestial (“Rain Clouds Descending”), the more work needed to digest is rewarded with other, more esoteric, affordances than previous.

Slow-flow psychoactive harmonized drones

‘Everything we know, from the stars and planets through to the fundamental, sub-atomic particles that make up all matter, is vibrating […] The known universe is a symphony. Ancient scientists and cosmologists such as Pythagoras, and later Kepler, postulated ‘the music of the spheres’ […]’

Thus spake Mark Burford aka Field Lines Cartographer, whose mus[ick]ing on the vibrations of all matter in the known universe, and, to be precise, entropy theory—that it could all end in the ‘heat death’ of the universe—drive This Vibrating Earth; cessation of its vibrations would bring with it the extinction of our planet and all its lifeforms, along with us. Sad indeed, especially voiced as here via FLC’s sundry synths and ambient sound captures in brooding, sometimes bucolic, soundscapes heard by some as “shimmering and unsettling” (The Wire), others as “the sound of big, strange worlds” (Electronic Sound).

Point being, if one there be, outside itself that is, is that if it is as the Entropists say, then our earth, while still oscillating, wildly or otherwise, is to be treasured, and as part of this we have here a kind of hymning: Music for ocean weathering, ice-cap melting and tectonic plate-shifting in six long-form pieces, extending over auricular and cartographic poles, conjoining psycho and geographic with swathes of synth-float and echoing delight, slow-flow psychoactive harmonized drones.

While the otherworldly and interstellar cartographies of 2022’s Dreamtides (igloo-‘view here) and Superclusters are still fresh and wild, here FLC pushes the sonic envelope into more atomically intense innerscaping; couched as it is in sprawling tracts from brooding pulse (“Still Canyon”) to queasy drones (“Hypogeum”), chthonic atmo (“Thawing Ice Temples”) to percolating celestial (“Rain Clouds Descending”), the more work needed to digest is rewarded with other, more esoteric, affordances than previous. Those for whom the murkier more abstract end of the Lancastrian synthetician’s spectrum resonates will thrill quietly to the sensurround sound world of This Vibrating Earth. Something of a Big Synthy Wolf in Little Environmental Ambient Sheep’s clothing (or the other way round?!). RIYL Pye Corner Audio, Dalham, Polypores, and other synthy stuff from Castles in Space.

This Vibrating Earth is available on Castles in Space [Bandcamp]