Pauline Oliveros/ Francisco Lopez/ Doug Van Nort/ Jonas Braasch - Quartet For The End of Space (CD)

From the moment I click play and get into Doug Van Nort's arresting 'Outer' I just really know that this is gonna be something quite special. Doug's piece is a startling transportation into the stars and beyond recalling classic early electronic music and science fiction movie soundtracks. Things start fairly calmly as I can visualize meteors passing by, until the climax where I feel like I'm being sucked inside out through a wormhole. Jonas' 'Web Doppelganger' give off an eerie lost in space mood with sounds manipulated from live improvisations. Francisco's piece as expected is very mysterious and cerebral with shifting tones, hiss, distant gurgle and pinprick fizzing micro sounds. Again staring at the back of my eyelids it's not difficult to imagine floating in a void, in the very fabric of time. Pauline Oliveros' 'Mercury Retrograde' is a journey in the fluid dynamics of liquid metal created using the EIS delay lines and modulations with ViMic and sound geometries. The results are a fascinating listen. This just covers half of the tracks here, the rest of which I recommend discovering for yourselves.