Stormhat — Turned On

Stormhat is undoubtedly an expert sound engineer. He blends natural and defiantly artificial sounds so organically that he almost seems to have secret surveillance equipment tapped into an alien realm. That being said, Turned On is neither cosmic nor otherworldly; this is the soundtrack of previously unseen inner space, and while there is no voice narrating the various occurrences that we hear, it is not hard to imagine Sir David Attenborough revealing the strange mating or feeding habits of these odd sonic creatures while we watch, fascinated at behavior to which we don’t relate but still try to personify.

Liquid bells, hums, and the low-tech rhythms of simple machines—here a pulley, there a hinge—beckon us into the “Nest” and then leave us there, bobbing in cold water while invisible equipment scans our vital statistics. The probing gets deeper and yet all the while remains strangely harmless. It does no good to be afraid, because like viruses these digital lifeforms cannot be deterred from fulfilling their purpose; their intentions are pure.

At this point, the synesthetic adventure has just begun: we leave the nest in a low hum and get stuck in an aerial antenna, receiving a distant expanse of multilingual field recordings obscured by various effects. Bits of barely detectable conversation and snippets of music flutter by like somebody else’s radio. Radio technology is clearly one cornerstone upon which Stormhat builds his worlds. As the title of one track suggests (“Cuypstraat from 11.16 to 12.35”), an hour and twenty minutes of environmental experiences are being installed into our memories; this process only takes a few minutes. Then we advance to the multicolored gravel pit. The atmosphere of frozen, metallic, and liquid life sustained throughout resembles the uninhabitable electronic tundras created by Nurse With Wound’s Shipwreck Radio series nearly a decade ago, which is appropriate considering that this release is brought to us by the small Norwegian label Twilight Luggage. This droning landscape, however, is inhabited by something. We can’t see them, but they keep moaning.

In “Soiled Feet,” we find ourselves peering through an air vent at nothing in particular as a nearby spacecraft warms up, idles, and finally fades. We never hear it launch, so we must be on board. This moment feels like the proper denouement of the recording, but the sound tapestry of “Nest” comes roaring back for “Live in Klub Träg.” Although the variety of sounds from the chemistry set ebbs and flows much faster than before, it remains entirely familiar, and thus Stormhat has played his trump card. We end up where we started. It’s the same place we’ve always known, but our experiences are constantly changing us, making everything new again. We are the aliens and have been looking at our own world all along.