Olhon — Underwater Passage

Underwater Passage is built  around sounds recorded from an abandoned telephone cable some 10km under the sea south of Livorno Italy. This may suggest we’d be in either dark ambient or field recording territory, but this is surprisingly is fairly varied both in sonic emotion and sound movement.

The sound is akin to an ever morphing sonic canvas or more fittingly sonic sea of drones, swirls, throbs and surprisingly haunting harmonic & positive air vibe, not the necessary dark/ murky edgy you would expect to purvey this kind of thing- sure there are darker and more sinister hues here, but all in all in keeps a nice balanced feel. At times this almost takes on quite a space bound snyth drone type quality or slowed techno synth drone edge. At others ominous and static morse code like patterns appear, At others it’s like strange aquatic voices trying to talk to you on-mass. The sound here is always in movement, developing and changing which I guess brings to mind a shifting and shaping changing aquatic or star bound creature that is either moving a fair speed many 100’s of feet under the sea, or many 1000's of space miles above us through multiple universes.

It comes in six panel digi-pak sleeve with pictures of the pipe and details of how the recordings were manipulated etc. This certainly a lot more varied than I imagined when approaching the project & for that reason I can see this appealingly beyond the normal dark ambient market, and enjoyed by anyone who enjoys creative and movement bound soundworlds.