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Science Of The Sea

by Jürgen Müller

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Meergrün 02:52
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Wasserwelt 02:37
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Meer Technik 02:10
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about

***Download includes bonus track***

"A skeptic might cast aspersions on the tale behind Jürgen Müller's Science of the Sea. The story begins at the University of Kiel in Germany, where the self-taught composer was studying oceanic science in the late 1970s. Müller purchased some electronic instruments and set them up on his houseboat in the town of Heikendorf, where he began crafting instrumental pieces that reflected his love of undersea life. His dream of selling those compositions to film and TV companies for use in documentaries never transpired. But Müller did press fewer than 100 vinyl copies of the recordings in the early 80s and titled them Science of the Sea, giving most of the albums away to friends and family. Fast forward three decades and a copy of the record ends up in the hands of Digitalis Recordings, just as a resurgence of interest in the type of new age recordings Müller was practicing is taking place.

So it's reasonable to wonder if the backstory was constructed as part of a larger concept, the way people continue to wonder about Ursula Bogner or Endless House. One intrepid blog commenter even claims to have contacted the University of Kiel and found no trace of Müller's presence. Either way it doesn't really matter, because the music on Science of the Sea continues that superior strain of contemplative elegance records such as Emeralds' Does It Look Like I'm Here? and Oneohtrix Point Never's Rifts have touched on in recent times. Like those releases, the relation Science of the Sea has to actual new age music is tangential at best. There are no Gheorghe Zamfir-esque pan flute solos or anything that will drive you to join a local color therapy group. Instead it's an uncomplicated series of recordings, mostly based around gently unfolding synth arpeggios set to faintly pulsing rhythms.

The tracks are short-- only five of the 12 here make it over the three-minute mark-- although Science of the Sea doesn't really make sense when broken down into its component parts. Instead each song works as a natural evolution of the theme set out in the opening "Beyond the Tide", where great washes of cleansing synth are interrupted by spiky twists of becalming noise that were presumably conceived to mimic dolphin chirps. It's not hard to see why this might have been thought of as a perfect soundtrack to a Jacques Cousteau-style undersea documentary. The following "Sea Bed Meditation" is full of rippling loops tied down by globs of tenderly resonating bass frequencies, not far removed from Klaus Schulze's contemplative solo ventures. Müller also shares Schulze's fondness for vaguely humorous song titles ("Dream Sequence For a Jellyfish", "The Elusive Seahorse").

What's remarkable about this album is how acutely it reflects and comments on the environment that served as its inspiration. "Waterworld" doesn't travel far beyond the coiling melody that ebbs and flows throughout the track, but it feels like the musical equivalent of a trail of oxygen bubbles arcing to the surface as a scuba diver peacefully plunges to the depths. Similarly, "Marine Technology" is all digital interference and signal jams, with zaps of synth noise pinging back and forth across the surface as though an urgent piece of undersea communication were being transmitted. Once you get deep into Science of the Sea, especially on headphones, it feels like Müller is simultaneously replicating that world and conveying his chimerical dreams about what it epitomizes. "Coral Fantasy" and "Vast Worlds Beneath" function as utopian fantasies about the great unknown, with Müller utilizing slowly disentangling sounds to give a sense of scale, wonder, and a natural curiosity about all the things that lay undiscovered down there.

The way Science of the Sea subtly shifts in theme, from then-current meditations on the ocean to quixotic impressions about its unexplored expanses, is its masterstroke. It feels like you're on a journey alongside Müller, carefully mapping out the thoughts and fears the murky depths have come to represent, all laid out in a way that your brain would naturally process if you were immersed in that world. The closing "Lonely Voyage" even feels like a warning of sorts, with its foreboding timbre suggesting that you can plunge a little too deeply into yourself if you spend too much time down there. That's where this album disconnects from anything that could perfunctorily be tagged as "new age." This isn't simple relaxation music, although much of it could easily perform that function. Instead the beautifully uncomplicated surface structures are used to prize open a boundless amount of feelings that are every bit as complex and unfathomable as the ocean itself."
-Pitchfork, 2011

credits

released April 1, 2011

Music composed and produced by Norm Chambers
Originally released on LP and CD by Digitalis, 2011
Mastered by Brad Rose

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Norm Chambers / Soft Profile Seattle, Washington

Electronic composer based in Seattle.

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