Melting Planets
At once vast and intimate, Melting Planets draws the listener into an immersive soundworld where nature behaves in unexpected ways: drops of rain might sound like a fusion of glassy, metal, wooden, plastic, and electric pops, while gravity shifts in multiple directions, causing bursts of sound to appear, vanish, and continuously descend into the unknown.
The album is the result of two years of musical and extramusical dialogue between three composers/improvisers – Sivan Cohen Elias (sound instruments/ objects, voice, live electronics), Lauren Siess (viola, objects, no-input mixer), and Cole Blouin (electric guitar, objects). Their collaboration culminated in this recording, artistically directed and produced by Sivan Cohen Elias.
The album embraces dynamic, visceral music, conceptualized as musical “scenes” set in fictional worlds undergoing surreal ecological collapse. Within these apocalyptic environments, new hybrid lifeforms begin to emerge. The trio imagined what might survive in an environment defined by constant, extreme transformations – shifting from extreme heat to deep freezes, from dryness to overwhelming humidity. They explored the evolution of a new physics and the struggles for survival that might emerge in such a world. What kinds of creatures would exist? They pictured hybrids of disproportionate, absurd body parts, and speculated on those creatures’ behaviors and interactions. In so doing, the trio discovered the absurdity of this world – its pain, its humor, its complexity, its hope, and its cycles.
On the sonic level, the album presents an intricate, electronic-heavy sound-world that deliberately defies genre classification. The imagery emerged through an ongoing dialogue with their collection of instruments and sound-making devices, which were blended in real-time using digital sound processing. The trio fused elements of classical, multicultural, and electronic instruments with unconventional objects (a complete list is below), while the live electronic manipulations transformed them into immersive, experiential sounds – inviting the listener to perceive the sound itself almost as a physical body, ensuring that the sound had the feeling of melting. One section of the album focuses on a drowning creature – a three-track piece that demands active listening, such that the listener can fully experience the creature’s voice, actions, emotions, and surroundings. It begins with a kazoo and viola mirroring each other in long, bending tones, recalling a desperate cry. Meanwhile, birdlike sounds emerge from electronic manipulations of a bowed fishing line tied around the guitar strings. As the piece unfolds, bubbling water and thick mud are sonically conjured through vibrating devices and a no-input mixer, gradually transforming into a soundscape of melting and drowning. The section culminates in a visceral, choral-like tutti performed on flute piccolo, bowed electric guitar, and viola.
The trio began improvising together in late 2021. In the summer of 2022, just before Siess left for composition studies in Dresden, Germany, and Cohen Elias departed for a teaching position at the University of Minnesota, they decided to record an album. From that session, one track stood out—Scoby Song—the only piece from that recording to make it onto the album. Its name reflects its role as a foundational element, a kind of starter culture for the material they continued to develop remotely over the following year. Throughout discussions, the trio kept returning to ideas of sonic walls, fermentation, unknown cultural sound, and the concept of sound melting. The long, frozen chord at the end of Scoby Song, along with the use of the kazoo and saxophone mouthpiece as tools for personification, became central motifs that evolved further as they worked towards the second recording session.
In the summer of 2023, the trio members reunited in NYC and rehearsed at Studio Fog Expanse, Cole’s recording and production space in Ridgewood, Queens, where they continued developing sonic “scenes” by forming a sequence of specified actions and reflected images while improvising the details, nuances, and musical flow. Over two intense days at Greyfade Studio, in Mount Vernon, New York, they recorded multiple takes of those scenes, along with free improvisations working in the same sonic atmospheres, and techniques. This session generated a wealth of material, which Cohen Elias later sorted, selected, and edited. Working with the phenomenal engineer Joseph Branciforte during postproduction – recording, mixing, and mastering – brought the album to life with the exact crispness, clarity, and immersive quality Cohen Elias had envisioned.
