Sonologyst – Planetarium
Cold Spring Records
Ah, to be floating, gliding, soaring through the silent everlastingness of outer space. Or, as the latest album from Sonologyst makes clear, the incredibly ominous, doom-laden rumble through the blackness. If NASA ever needed a house band for the heat death of the universe, Sonologyst would be first on the call sheet. ‘Planetarium’, the latest transmission from Raffaele Pezzella’s sonic observatory, isn’t so much an album as it is a black box recording from the edge of time. The ship is going down – slowly.
Disc one plays like a haunted tour of the solar system, guided not by melody or rhythm, but by the electromagnetic sighs and plasma burps of cosmic bodies. Yes, through the icy cold electronics, there’s a surprising organic beauty to the sounds – an oily bloom of celestial flowers, and a seething of ancient volcanoes. These aren’t compositions in the traditional sense. They’re field recordings from the void, raw, unfiltered, and eerily alive. Pezzella has taken data harvested from NASA’s deep-space probes – Voyager, Cassini, Juno – and run them through the alchemical process of data sonification. The result? A series of dark ambient vignettes that feel less like music and more like eavesdropping on the dnightmares of dying planets.
‘Microphones on Mars’ opens like a malfunctioning life-support system, all wheezing static and low-frequency dread, before morphing into something that sounds suspiciously like an underwater lullaby. Elsewhere, “’67p-Churyumov-Gerasimenko’ (I’d love to hear someone requesting that at a gig) pulses with a kind of glacial menace, as if an asteroid belt was trying to communicate to itself in a language of subharmonic Morse code.
But it’s the second disc where ‘Planetarium’ fully sheds its skin and reveals its alien core. A single, 57-minute slab of pure sonified data, it’s less a track and more a ritual. No track titles, no breaks, no concessions to the listener’s comfort. Just the raw, unadorned voice of the cosmos, humming and crackling like a dying transistor god. It’s the kind of thing that would make Stockhausen blush and Sun Ra nod in solemn approval.
There’s a strange intimacy to it all. Despite the galactic scale of the source material, ‘Planetarium’ feels like a personal odyssey, transplanting you into a real-time documentary at half speed. Pezzella doesn’t manipulate the data into something digestible. He doesn’t wrap it in melody or rhythm or narrative. He lets it speak. And what it says is both terrifying and beautiful: that the universe is not silent, and that its voice is stranger than we ever imagined.
What’s remarkable is how ‘Planetarium’ manages to be both deeply scientific and profoundly mystical. It’s a record that could sit comfortably in a physics lecture or a séance. There’s a reverence here, a sense that Pezzella isn’t just making music, he’s communing with something vast and unknowable.
The packaging only adds to the mythos. Issued as a 2CD gatefold ecopak, it comes with a set of original space-race-era stamps, tiny relics of humanity’s first fumbling attempts to touch the stars. And of course it’s on CD. Let’s stop pretending it isn’t a wonderful way to experience music. It’s a lovely, tactile reminder that while ‘Planetarium’ may be built from data and code, it’s ultimately about how we respond to it.
It’s not something you’ll whistle along to at the bus stop. It’s here to remind you that you’re a speck of carbon clinging to a rock hurtling through space, and that the universe doesn’t care if you’re comfortable.
Daz Lawrence
