The third volume of Hypnus Records’ Deep Blue series is a bodily hypnotic journey. “Deep Blue: Volume 3” by Luigi Tozzi comes together so well it feels like a continuous subterranean journey from deep sea to an even deeper cavern, filled with earthy rhythm and sounds of the creatures that live there.
The rhythms are deeply subterranean or oceanic. A probing echolocative click, the communication of grotesque arachnids and bats evolving over millions of years towards blindness, cut off from any source of light, fills out the constantly shifting midrange. A top layer, somehow moving around the physical space of the track, sounds like the unseen phosphorous discharge of stalactites reshaping unexplored systems into cathedral-like termite hills, diffracting the sound. There is special attention paid to the imagining of space through reverb.
The atmosphere evoked by the pads is ominously soothing, the calm experienced wandering through an aquarium late at night. As it progresses, it tunnels deeper into this system, drums rolling in and out on some geological timescale. Taravana seems to emanate from the furthest depth. The sub bass warbles as the low imperceptible hum of magnetic fields generated by the friction of the turning molten cores of the earth. All high frequency elements are muted and delicately quiet, as though sifted through sheets of mist. Sound waves travel faster in denser materials, against intuition.
Each kick lands with its own select band pass, a placement of emphasis on the click or the body helping to color in the environmental context of the track. There’s the rhythmic flow of techno or even dub techno, but with sprays of emotion and melody not usually found in these genres. I could easily see an artist like Phase making great use out of this volume.
A track like Posidonia, following some reverse trajectory of evolved life, moves from the cave and into the deep ocean. Some moments shine like rays of light illuminating a billion billion microorganisms in shallow coastal water; hundred-meter ribbons of sapphire light interrupted by the migration of a school of sturgeon, shimmering across the soundscape in brain-tingling bursts of activity.
Vinyl hiss comes out of sonaric clicks of creatures blindly probing the deep. The bassline of Le Grand Blue rumbles like ultraslow trance, music slowed down to accommodate the limiting physical constraints of dancing underwater. What it ultimately succeeds in capturing is the majesty of the very deep and the intricate beauty of the systems and beings adapted to living there, the hidden acoustic world in the deep blue and even deeper black.
-Winston Mann
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