Latest item from Italian sound-art maestro Sonologyst (Raffaele Pezzella) is Planetarium (COLD SPRING RECORDS CSR359CD), two CDs of atmospheric outer space sounds.
After a few prior releases which have touched on paranoiac cold-war themes, he’s now turning his attention to data captured by NASA’s space probes. As per the format of the Shortwave Spectrum release from 2024, which was preoccupied with the ever-popular Numbers Stations and shortwave radio static, we have one disc of music and another disc of untreated source materials – the second disc here is called “solar system data sonification and recordings”. Studious record collectors may already know about the five CDs in the Symphonies Of The Planets series which came out in the 1990s – these, and other NASA recordings, were issued by Brain/Mind Research in the USA, a label dedicated to mental health and well-being, hoping to soothe the troubled brains of mankind with new-age type sounds; Saturn, Uranus and Neptune featured among these NASA space probe recordings, along with ambient sessions from the Psycho-Sensory Integration Series conducted by Dr Jeffrey Thompson.
Sonologyst’s agenda might not be so benign; almost everything he touches ends up processing itself into dark ambient of one strain or another, with real or imagined menace lurking at every corner. Admittedly, today’s item doesn’t exhibit the outright terror suggested by his 2018 release, Silencers: The Conspiracy Theory Dossiers, but there are still plenty of unexplained and inexplicable audio delights in this suite, which the label is quite happy to describe as “immersive” – see also the recent Martyn Ware item from this season. There’s some science-101 notes in the press release which explains that most sounds from outer-space are in fact barely audible by the human ear, consisting of “radio waves, electromagnetic waves, and plasma”, and NASA scientists have developed their own technology to turn this data into something the human ear can perceive. They can also convert image data into sounds; at any rate, the same data that produces images via the Hubble telescope can transform light into audio, for instance by “mapping brightness to pitch and volume, and the surrounding stars are pitched to musical notes”. Interestingly, some of the “events” they measure take a very long time to complete, and one simple trick they use is to speed up the recording.
NASA are doing all of this, I suppose, to learn something useful about phenomena in outer space, and they make a lot of their research (including audio files of these sounds) freely available on the web. At one level, Sonologyst might not be doing much more than adding echo, reverb and edits to his selected samples, but the record could be said to fit into his general scheme and pursuits, as documented within his Unexplained Sounds Group. (23/06/2025)