Obsolete Constellations is an immensely peaceful journey.
The recording is the latest from the prolific London-based Oliviaway. A concealed composer of somewhat autobiographical ambient electronic music, the recording marks the third in a set of albums released by the artist this month.
The musician, who has amassed a massive catalogue of nearly 350 works over the past decade, returned from a brief hiatus with these new works published in a matter of days this month.
Obsolete Constellations, released June 25, conjures images of reflective tranquility — an undisturbed meadow, a forest floor gently dappled in light and a chilly beachfront miles from any development.
As the project’s title implies, this collection consists of three individual works. These soundscapes are collectively aligned by a core celestial undertone.
“This album came out of the hazy summer heat,” the artist stated. “I made it for those quiet moments when all you want is to sink into sound and forget about time. Thank you for being here — your support truly means the world to me.”
Opening with the title track, this nearly ten-minute piece encourages the listener to spend their summer nights under an open sky, uncontaminated by light pollution.
Throughout the album, the music moves at a pace that mimics the steady, nearly unobservable movement of constellations across the night sky.
“Ferrofluid Bloom” takes the listener into an unknown dark space — deeper into a thick sonic forest. It carries the listener toward the bright, ever-burning stars.
At just over thirteen minutes, it is the longest composition on the album.
The musical center of the album most vividly conveys the cover image of the work: the constellation Ursa Major cresting Mount Etna in arid Sicily. It is an image by the astrophotographer Dario Giannobile.
The composition conveys the cold peace of a desert at night and the vibrancy of the night sky in a remote, isolated landscape.
The album comes to an end with “The Hum Between Galaxies,” a nearly ten-minute-long conclusion to this investigation into the night sky.
Like the composition that preceded it, this final work carries a slight dissonance, offering an auditory representation of two different sources of energy and electromagnetic waves melding into one another.
The piece is a musical rendering of the immeasurable balance between chaos and order in the natural world. Its textures, folding and intertwining, depict a melding of light and signals from distant places meeting at a single point at a particular moment — perhaps that place is the Earth’s night sky and that moment is now.
Obsolete Constellations offers a sonic journey beyond the habitable confines of this world, the third planet from Sol. It is an adventure well worth taking, and one that would be most appropriate while staring up at the open sky, deep in the night this summer.
