Sound of Ceres / Marina Abramović - Emerald Sea

2022 CD release.

Emerald Sea, the third album from New York-based audiovisual project Sound of Ceres, tells the story of how the universe comes to know itself. Rendered in dynamic, ambitious orchestral passages, it forms the basis of future stage performances intended to draw it's half-submerged narrative into the visual sphere. In it's dreamlike impressions, it could also be the soundtrack to a long-forgotten early musical film - an experience that delighted and transported audiences and then vanished from record, surviving only in the imprint of memory.

Written in three acts, Emerald Sea follows two deities who trail each other through the furthest reaches of experience. There is the Universe, all that exists, voiced by performance artist Marina Abramović. And there is Venus, transformer of matter and avatar of love, sung by the group's lead vocalist Karen Hover (who goes by k). Through a dazzling suite of songs inspired by Les Baxter's midcentury exotica, Maurice Ravel's ballet Daphnis et Chloé, and Gustav Holst's The Planets, Emerald Sea studies intimacy on both an interpersonal scale and a cosmological one. Connection and severance, joy and grief, wonder and bewilderment all tumble through it's scope. In the widest frame, the universe begins, meets itself, and ends. In the closest frame, two people encounter each other, grow close, and then separate. These stories are two views of the same fractal. In every intimacy human beings cultivate, every rush of connection, no matter how fleeting, we reenact the universe for ourselves. "I envisioned myself journeying through these different realms - space, the land, the sea, the heavens - and following Marina's character," says k. "I always saw her as a shadow figure that I couldn't quite figure out." Ryan says, "The album's story is an allegory for the emergence of mind and meaning from the matter of the universe, and it's eventual fading, with a glimmer of hope at the end."