"Let us for a moment suspend our disbelief (also setting aside the info on the cd-inlay itself on the instruments used to create the work) and take for a fact that these are actual recordings made at the fringes of the sun’s influence-sphere: could this then be the new pastoral music of our age? Listening to some of the recordings of solar VLF radio waves (which in fact Aaron Lennox cites as being the source of inspiration for this release under review) made by the ‘master’ in the field Stephen McGreevy one could certainly consider this to be so; the almost cricket-like chirpings and whirrings (augmented by the actual chorus of cicadas ever on the background) evoke at times a very rural – and peaceful – ambience indeed. There are also other, more disturbing elements to these recordings too, though, with penetrant pops and crackles of electromagnetic static at times carving deep etches into the pastoral surface.
Although the artist's fascination with NASA recordings and cicada choruses showcased on former releases in combination with backporch guitarplaying did strike at times a very pastoral balance indeed, as to this release under review I would definitely answer with a negative: this is no pastoral music, which has largely to do with the absence of any guitarplaying that can be distinguished as such. Here, rather, one is exposed to what eventually becomes an ear-fluttering solar wind (an effect in part achieved through the meticulous and pregnant manipulations of the stereo-spectrum) forming in fact the last breath of the sun one will ever again be exposed to – an aural experience difficult to mindlessly and obliviously acquiesce in. Even in its most ‘pastoral’ movements – which evoke an erosive quantum ocean lapping away at our psychic matter, our consciousness diluted by an ever waning void until eventually imploding in an airless storm – the fundamentally unimaginable and unaccountable character of what would here be sonically represented denies the auditor a truly comfortable listening-position.
But, as was already clear from the start, this is not an actual ‘field’-recording of any kind whatsoever. This is rather a reconstruction, designed by the sonic imagination, of these unimaginable cosmic events." --Mark Pauwen,
earlabs.org
released January 1, 2007