Sonologyst: Planetarium – Album Review & Interview

Even if they don’t explicitly embark on such a voyage nor predetermine the album at hand as being an album about…well space, the metaphor for the internally twisted mechanisms of humankind to excel their wildest dreams, the more menacing metaphor that the cosmos is capable of crushing us to dust like a bug below the forefinger of a teenage giant becomes ever more poignant.

The same cosmos that, back here, at home, surrounded by bricks and mortar, a landmass of concrete fields and glass mountains of post-industrial waste,  can open it’s jaws and devour the minds of many, leaving them an obsessed relic of a creature curled up in a ball on their bedroom floor, semi-naked, eyes frozen into marble, a string of saliva reaching from the corner of the mouth to the centre of the carpet – the finality of man-machine who dared to breach the event horizon of its unknown pleasures. The cosmos is here.

Life on other planets? Not quite. Too cheesy. One wrong turn in a subject matter as vastly unimaginable as the universe, and the chilling intensity, the supposed impact of the concept is reduced to a baby mobile-sized planetarium hovering above the planet, a jaded novelty, a metaphor for nothing except an embarrassing scrapbook of corny paraphernalia.

Good job then, that on Planetarium, the new album from aural explorer released via Cold Spring and the next in a line of works that set out to ”convert cosmic phenomena into immersive auditory experiences,” the novelty is far from grasp. The cosmos speaks. It’s bilingual. It communicates in myriad ways.

The album is composed of raw data files from radio waves, electromagnetic fields and plasma fluctuations captured on recordings from NASA, European Space Agency, and the former Soviet Union’s space program. These non-audible signals are what create the ”sounds” on the record and do so through a process known as data sonification. This technique, along with others such as amplitude modulation and sampling, enables the files to be converted into audio frequencies we mere humans can hear, as many signals such as solar winds, planetary magnetospheres or charged particles, are far beyond what our ear can detect. Once converted, the sounds are often enhanced by amplifying specific frequencies or introducing layers and make the data more multi-dimensional, a way to augment the sensory allure of the album, with virtually no inch of the beyond, at least as far as these thirteen pieces go, left unchecked.

Sonologyst, understanding the cosmos itself as the songbook with more than a few mysterious musical gifts that keep on giving, visualising these files as possessing the same intrigue as an instrument, not so much abandoned, forgotten, nor forsaken even, but just in need of being tuned back into life and tempted into view, crafts the collation into shape, extracting nuances in the files and embellishing them into recurrently breathtaking results. ”More broadly,” he states, ”I’d say most of my works follow a kind of documentary method where sound becomes a medium for exploring specific phenomena, whether scientific, historical, or metaphysical.”

Born in Naples, Italy, on May 8th, 1971, Raffaele Pezzella first forayed into the subject matters explored as Sonologyst when he was a young boy drawn to all things metaphysical, paranormal and scientific. Inspired by ”private rituals” by watching late 70s/early 80s sci-fi and horror films such as the Italian spy/sci-fi movie Octhechi dalle Stelle (Eyes From the Stars, 1978), the lineage from the boy peeking out from behind a protective cabin of blankets, to the Sonologyst before us today, can be traced to these formative experiences. ”Before becoming sonic material,” he says, ”these ideas were part of my personal landscape of exploration, shaped by books, theories, and the mysteries that linger on the edges of knowledge, an unexplored corner of perception. I’m driven by the urge to investigate, through sound, those things that are hidden, marginal, or beyond ordinary human experience.”

After studying mathematics and physics at the University of Naples, Pezzella graduated as a sound technician in 1999. He began experimenting with electronic media in 2000, resulting in a four-track album, his debut, Memorie Elettroniche Sonore, released on PeopleSound, a label sponsored by neurophonic device manufacturer, TDK. After studying guitar and developing his technical skills in electronic music, he returned to music production, bringing to life many ideas he had explored in earlier years. One of which is this.

Blue Neptune blooms a vaporous broadcast of uncanny, ambient reverie. A distorted drill digging for a sought-after ore below the dense surface of a planet frozen in waves of white. A fragmented glitch- ballet of melodic motifs eventually survives the spectrum before being smouldered completely, they twinkle and themselves on an ancient stringed instrument forged out of crystal and stone, plunged into the bottom of the deepest abyss.
AANext up, Ultra Low Black Hole Frequencies needs no description. It simply appears. An isolationist ambient mist descends across a landscape of choke-smoked valleys. Such unsettling, doom-laden fits of ash-ingesting power are only intensified in their ominous nature by textural washes of noise and fluorescent voices gently flickering through it.
Heavy, possibly heavier, S-1981 S 13 Pan-Saturn’s Moon is a splintered surge of mangled bass grunt. The disembowelling growl eventually dissipates to a nightmarish surgical theatre of caustic jazz chords, stacks of substrate scraping against layers of plague-ridden dissonance.

After 2015’s Silencers, a record ”inspired by the testimonies of those who have had contact with the so-called ‘Silencers’ or ‘Men in Black’, Ancient Death Cults And Beliefs from 2020, and Interdimensional from 2022, a record interested in exploring the ”paraphysical dimension of cosmic music”, Planetarium is the next release in a series of Cold Spring albums after that initial trilogy established Sonologyst as an artist interested in the exposure of the fantastical intersections where one type of science ends and another begins, those boundaries not just between, but beyond the reach of science begin to blur, a space where facts and rationale are scorched at the edges, the pages partially missing, text redacted, the inky words fading into some frustrating obscurity where no amount of squinting can extract any vital, wondrous cipher.

And although we can appreciate the scientific consistency between each one of those records, they must be understood as individual investigations about uniquely individual subjects. Sonic documentaries, with sound instead of film, where each record exhibits an aural quench of compulsive curiosity, a meticulously assembled striving to not simply provide answers to age-old questions (aliens, conspiracies, ritualistic cannibalism, hyperspace, the cosmos), but rather to augment the argument by what has been discovered and imbue us with the thrill to satiate more complicated questions as a matter of existential urgency. When it comes to the work of Sonologyst, despite the science, it is that which glues all these theories together through myriad extremes and degrees, it is that which is consistent. The cosmos metaphorically mirrors our own internal demons, scavengers and savants crouched atop this charred ruin.

”For me,” Pezzella states, ”each release stands on its own, sparked by different sources of inspiration that evolve over time, rather than following a strict conceptual progression. I’ve never consciously planned my albums as trilogies or tetralogies, even though some listeners have interpreted them that way. That said, Planetarium and Shortwave Spectrumdo share a particular kinship. Shortwave Spectrum, also released in 2023 on Cold Spring Records, was based on shortwave radio transmissions and Cold War-era signal phenomena. Planetarium, on the other hand, draws from the raw sonification of radio waves. These two albums can be seen as a kind of diptych, as both are built around real archival recordings and scientific source material.
AA”In contrast, Silencers, Ancient Death Cults and Beliefs, and Interdimensional are not grounded in actual archives. They explore their themes, secret technologies, esoteric belief systems, and hypothetical dimensions, through a more imaginative and interpretative sound design approach.”

As an example of what Pezzella terms ”sonic phenomenology,” a method that aims to not simply to represent something, but rather, to interrogate it, Planetarium is a fierce, often ominous and looming journey. A grinding manifestation of musique concrète and pitch black ambient instrumental hexes that devastate anything in their path, the more their newly discovered selves are sonically revealed. We regularly feel adrift, dwarfed, touched, torn apart, lost, and found in the maelstrom of the incomprehensible beyond. We are mercilessly engulfed by its brooding waves.

This beyond the beyond takes us to Venera 4V-1 No.310 where we are sucked into and swept up by the mountain-shattering solar winds with the stubbornness of a bulldozer crashing through partitions of breezeblocks. It unleashes an unholy noise replicating the compressed rush of sound absorbed when travelling on the Northern line on the London Underground. We hear a chant but can’t be sure why or what with any kind of clarity, these demons speak of when they peek at us from between dangling pieces of chain.
This beyond the beyond plunges into the plutonium tidal wave of Plutonian Transmissions, where we kneel before the foot of an amplified surge of deathly bass noise, secreting ambient excrement in its chamber of psychic solitude. Like the sands of time spilling from world-weary clocks. It is an indomitable mass of plasma wave bursts in a post-industrial netherworld. We are thrown into a similar state of bass-leaden power with Kuiper Belt. A star-sucking dub mutation stolen from the Bug’s Killing Sound album.

From the expansive churn of Jupiter’s Moons to the agitated clicks and ethereal, inner city chorale of Microphones on Mars, the album exhales and wheezes a rhythmic noise that is hard to escape like Thomas Köner collaborating with KK Null. The former cracks and creaks forwards whilst a serenade of trains rattle in the distance, hallucinatory silhouettes of each carriage create a feeling, despite the intense cold, of familiar warmth, like being in the womb again, muffled conversations in the external world, interrupts peace on the other. The latter offers a more plaintive vibration not unlike specks of dust floating in front of the television or a ray of sunshine kissing one’s neck, the album exhales and wheezes a rhythmic noise that is hard to escape. A cybernetic city of light and noise, of train station waiting rooms, car park lifts with no one in them, or wandering satellites humming to themselves, lonesomely spinning above everything and everyone.

There’s a lot to absorb. A lot to feel. A lot to think about. But without Pezzella’s conceptual research, to collecting the source material, shaping the sounds, and arranging the structure of the album, without his initial intrigue in what is out there, lurking behind the screens of the sky, or buried centuries belowground, as secrets concealed from contemporary life, there’d be nothing. Just the signal. The waves. Nothing for us anyway. Time doesn’t care if we’re around or not to take note. Space doesn’t care if we’re around to prod its extraordinarily vast emptiness. Time and space passing us by, mere insects peddling against the spokes of a tired, old wheel, trying to make ourselves feel better about being able to turn it one more rotation.
AA”I usually take care of everything myself. It’s a solo process, and that’s something I’ve come to value deeply. It allows me to fully immerse myself in the topic and to develop a very personal connection with the sounds and the stories I try to tell through them,” he states. ”In 2024, I collaborated with other musicians for two albums, and in those cases, the music tended to shift toward more abstract experimental electronics, often without a clearly defined conceptual theme. That kind of collaboration can be exciting and enriching in its own way. But when I’m dealing with subjects like science, mystery, or metaphysics, I find that solo work gives me the focus and space I need. It becomes a more meditative and concentrated process, which I feel is essential for the kind of sonic storytelling I aim for.”

Although what we hear on Planetarium are non-audible signals collected by NASA converted into sound, you’d be gravely mistaken if you thought what we hear on Planetarium is simply that and nothing more – a data dump. Like an aural montage spliced together in the same sequence, the task at hand to make sense of these arbitrary tangents of noise and chaos requires a far greater investment from the artist, essential in his ability to work with and weave together a landscape of sound, without which, everything would float into an intangible dissolve of nothingness like the debris and detritus of an opium-addled mind.
AA”I simply set out to create my own personal version of a sonic encyclopaedia of science and mystery. The sonification’s are just the raw material,” states Pezzella. ”What I try to do, as best as I can, is build a story around them. I shape and manipulate the files, add loops, play synthesisers, and bring everything together with a mix that, hopefully, carries what could be recognised as a ‘Sonologyst signature.’ It’s an attempt to let people discover space by listening to its hidden voice. Whether or not I succeed, I hope the result sparks curiosity and imagination.”

Since 2014, Pezzella has been serving as the curator of Unexplained Sounds, a ‘Global Network of Aural Disorientation’ interested in ”mapping and promoting the global underground scene of experimental music.” It is responsible for albums inspired by the works of highly revered figures such as Phillip K. Dick’s dystopias, William Burrough’s cut-up texts, William Gibson’s neuromancer inhabited universe and recently, the cult film Eraserhead by David Lynch, a project which began months before the passing of the director. The network’s primary label, Unexplained Sounds Group, was established in 2015 and 2021, with Eighth Tower label expanding into book publications and an online magazine, Eighth Tower.

Currently, the network encompasses subsidiaries such as Eighth Tower Records, ZeroK, and Reverse Alignment. He also hosts a streaming radio program titled The Recognition Test. Through these channels, Pezzella’s intention ”to offer the listener an immersive journey through the solar system, not through images or data, but through sound” amongst other ambitious works that introduce audiences with enough of an imagination to leave their incredulous inhibitions behind, can be globally realised.
AA”One of its most distinctive projects is the Sound Mapping series, a long-running collection of compilations that explore experimental, electronic, and avant-garde music from all over the world,” Pezzella explains. ”The idea behind Sound Mapping is both curatorial and a bit anthropological. Each volume focuses on a specific country or region, from Iran to China, from South Africa to Lebanon, and showcases artists who often work far from the spotlight but are doing truly original and exciting things. It’s about giving space to voices outside the mainstream and building a kind of sonic map of global experimental sound. There’s amazing stuff happening everywhere, you just have to be curious enough to go find it and, most importantly, listen.”

Our time here. Our small complaints. Our boring woes. Our benign, eternally rehearsed lines filmed without notice. Of course, exceptions abound if you know the soft spot of the wall to press your ear against. Psychic TV taught us that. Sonologists teach us that, too. Scientists in the things we can’t see or hear but can connect us to the same strength of feeling as having our heads held in place by frames of vicious light and fields of turbulent noise. Arrestingly psychedelic. Oddly comforting. Space is the place. Music as astra.

Today, NASA shares that their Voyager 1 probe, launched in 1977 and currently more than 14.9 billion miles away from earth, reached the heliopause: a boundary where the solar winds of the sun start to fade in their magnetic power and the solar winds of interstellar space are in balance. At this point- it discovered a “wall of fire”. A sparse wall, but still…a wall.

Life on other planets? Not quite. And when feeling alone has never sounded so…rewarding, who the hell cares!

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