Cosmo Sheldrake
Emily Howard
NMC Recordings
THERE are worlds out there, both beyond and within our own, that aren鈥檛 easily reached or captured in the mind鈥檚 eye. Two new albums tackling disparate subjects 鈥� the soundscape of the deep ocean and the many wonders of geometry 鈥� have managed to bring two such realms to life, making the intangible tangible through their carefully crafted songs.
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Wild Wet World, the latest album from musician and composer Cosmo Sheldrake, is a seven-track homage to the ocean as told by the creatures in it. It is a sonic collage of marine life, comprised almost entirely of underwater recordings. These range from whale song and grunting toadfish to the drumming of male haddock, a mating call each creates by vibrating specialised muscles next to its swim bladder.
While sounds recur across tracks 鈥� the snapping of shrimp, a crackling noise that can be heard throughout the ocean, forms the backdrop to most of them 鈥� they are recontextualised so judiciously you hardly notice it. Benthos, for instance, named for the organisms at the bottom of a body of water, is pulsating and grimy in a way quite unlike any other song on the album, despite sharing sounds with tracks like Plankton and Blow Hole.
The recordings were captured by marine biologists, the US Navy or Sheldrake himself. The only time a human presence is felt is in the album鈥檚 opening track, Bathed in Sound, where Sheldrake鈥檚 haunting vocals bring the listener down into the depths of the ocean and conjure images of whales 鈥渁ll wrapped in plankton and glinting green, drifting onwards through shifting seas鈥�.
Those shifting seas, beset by overfishing, pollution and ambient human-made noise, are highlighted in the album鈥檚 final song, Nekton, featuring the mournful calls of the UK鈥檚 last resident colony of orcas in the Hebrides. While our oceans can feel remote and alien at times, the album鈥檚 call to conserve them is a concrete message to hold onto.
A more abstract realm is conjured by composer Emily Howard in Torus, a collection of four geometry-inspired pieces. Each of these 鈥渙rchestral geometries鈥� attempts to capture the 鈥渟hape energy鈥� of its subject 鈥� language that might alienate some listeners, but Howard鈥檚 lyricism has led to marvellously uncanny results that take vast leaps in pitch and volume in their stride.
The album鈥檚 title track is a 20-minute epic depicting that topological marvel the torus, a three-dimensional shape with one hole that is often likened to a ring doughnut. This is perhaps the easiest composition to connect to its corresponding shape. You feel a sense of oscillation and the void at its centre. At points, you could easily imagine yourself beside an actual torus: a thrumming tokamak at the heart of a nuclear fusion reactor.
To compose Sphere, the album鈥檚 outlier in that it is just 5 minutes long, Howard imagined travelling over the shape鈥檚 convex surface and encountering new landscapes. It is a spiralling work of fits and starts, with long pauses punctuated by bursts of brass and restless strings.
But it is in rendering Sphere鈥榮 dark double, Antisphere, that Torus is most interesting. Picturing this shape 鈥� a surface with constant negative curvature that falls outside Euclidean geometry 鈥� would be difficult enough, let alone capturing it in sound. The result is triumphant and strange, a shimmering klaxon that sounds like the workings of some near-future mechanism.
Antisphere shares some DNA with another track, Compass, a marriage of percussion and strings that is the most opaque of the four pieces. It is also the only one that left me feeling adrift 鈥� but there are far worse places to get lost than in these vivid geometries.
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