- An album of haunting synth music made with custom VST plugins created by Fratila in collaboration with NASA, meant to replicate the atmospheres of each planet in our solar system.
- I want to leave this Earth behind has its roots in Sononaut, a multi-year research project that Canadian artist Stefana Fratila conducted in collaboration with NASA scientists to figure out what each of the eight planets (sorry, Pluto) would "sound" like. In her words: "If each planet in our solar system were a different room, what would each room sound like?"
The result was eight free, open-source VST plugins, each attempting to emulate the atmospheric conditions and natural hum of a given planet. For her album I want to leave this Earth behind, Fratila used the plugins with a handful of synthesizers to make her own tracks that reflect each astronomical body. It's a spellbinding LP of sound art that delights and unnerves in equal measure.
You might call this ambient music, but it's more active than other space-themed ambient records like Lustmord's Dark Matter, the closest thing to an antecedent I can think of. Instead, these are living, breathing compositions that twist and transform, like what you might imagine a time-lapse of a planet's outer atmosphere to look like. It's fun to pin attributes of certain planets to certain sounds, but aside from the ominous, airless opener "Mercury"—which Fratila says was difficult to capture because the planet has no atmosphere—for the most part, the sonic differences feel random. But that doesn't make the tracks any less effective.
The synths here gurgle and swirl in abstract patterns. "Jupiter" references early Tangerine Dream (before the sequencers took over) and features strange, bubbly sounds. "Mars" feels totally inhospitable, with strange, scraping noises and a sepulchral organ moaning in the background. This is where the album's immersive approach pays off: it really does feel like you're sitting in some foreign atmosphere, and it's not always a pleasant place to be. "Uranus" starts out as an extremely aggravating buzz before ending rather peacefully as a sort of sci-fi synth doodle. Listening to a track like "Uranus" makes even me, an avowed non-musician, want to play around with these plugins to figure out how they work. Mission accomplished.
Earth," predictably, is the prettiest cut here, with an actual chord progression and billowing melodies. It's almost orchestral in scope, a lifeline of familiarity in the sea of rumbling black. "Neptune," with its bleeps and whirrs, evokes old-school cyberpunk, while "Venus" offsets its rumbling industrial noises with beautiful but decaying melodies, almost like a beatless Detroit techno track.
The album comes with a lot of context, but also none at all. The research that went into it took years, and was painstaking, but the music is what it is: befuddling, bewitching, odd. You can let it wash over you and experience each track as a different place, which is its strongest suit. With each track at 5:05, it really is like a guided, methodical tour, and that idea has roots in something much deeper. Fratila, who suffers from debilitating chronic pain, is a cofounder of Crip Rave, a collective who do the frankly revolutionary work of centering disabled people and their needs into the electronic music scene.
So I want to leave this Earth behind is almost an escapist fantasy about leaving the physical behind. Maybe you can have a new, better body on Mercury, or maybe you don't have one at all on Jupiter, which is a swirling juggernaut of gas. These tracks allow us to imagine living somewhere else, even if that somewhere else is an unimaginable other planet. It makes the project all the more powerful, but also doesn't define it. This is serious academic research translated into gripping music with personal, emotional undertones. It's the sound of a gifted artist searching for other places and new ways to be, like so many electronic musicians before her.
Tracklist01. Mercury
02. Venus
03. Earth
04. Mars
05. Jupiter
06. Saturn
07. Uranus
08. Neptune