Dolphins Into The Future Interview

by Ida Griesemer

On his site, Cetacean Nation Communications, Lieven Martens writes, "My music is a landscape. A ku'ono for your mind to hike in. For the exploration of a personal jungle. For the atonement of a world out there, above there, in there. A spring of harmonies. A bay of sound. A natural and abstract composition, rooted in romance and subconsciousness." Martens is a Belgian artist, based in Antwerp, who recently toured in the US with Monopoly Child Star Searches and Floris Vanhoof. Before his performance at Sarah Lawrence College on April 11th, we talked about his inspiration, process, sonic sources, and plans for… the future. Below is a picture of us ("You should be in it too - the interviewer is just as important," he said) and below that is our conversation.

LL: Can you talk about your musical history; how long you've been with this project and projects you've done before that? LM: I've been doing this since 2006 I think. Or 2007. That's under the name Dolphins Into the Future. But I've done similar stuff, but more deep manipulation, for I don't know, a bunch of years. LL: More deep? LM: Not more deep, but more… rusty. It was more just pure music. Dolphins into the Future is supposedly more centered through specific ideas and theories. It's not just music. It's more like a complete thing. The earlier stuff I did was just music; music of life. LL: And your more recent stuff is informed by philosophy? LM: Yeah. Theosophy. It's a movement that started in the mid-1800s. They do thesis of all the spiritual information in the world. She's called Blavatsky and she wrote a book called The Secret Doctrine. It's about, actually, just the past future and present of mankind. Mankind both in a physical way - like, we were born - but also in a ritual way. They use old pre-religious doctrine style writing. Pre-Christianity. LL: As it relates to your music process, how do you bring in those writings? LM: When I do an album - like I did an album called Music of Belief. Because I'm interested in how religious music is being created. You know, Buddhist music or even Christian music. For half a year I only read devotional texts. To see how that affects my brain, and what I make. And so that album sounds quite different from all my other stuff. But I have other albums. I made an album called Ke Ala Ke Kua. That's about the Kealakekua Bay in Hawaii, and all the things surrounding there. So it's not purely philosophical. It's one of the inspirations. LL: What was it about that place that drew you to make an album about it? LM: It's a heavy power stop for the Cetacean Nation. It just attracts a lot of activity around it. People who want to establish communication between man and dolphin. It's also just a place that looks like artwork from Caspar David Friedrich, the German painter. Just the colors and stuff and how it's all caved. I've been there. I did field recordings and camped there with a bunch of friends. LL: Do you use your field recordings as your samples in your music? LM: Yeah. LL: Are all of your samples things that you've recorded? LM: Mostly. Not all. But I started using them because I was interested in the musicality of - like when you record birds singing, instead of a surround-image it's a 2-D image. An aural image. And then if you listen to it, as a kind of music, there's a different, non-human, mathematic part to it. It's like classical musical done by an alien presence. A non-human presence. LL: There's something mathematic to it? LM: When you're a person and you write music it's mathematically like - you have octaves, or if you play certain notes and divide it, then it's another note… but birds their sound is a non-human mathematical sound. And it's just like listening to ocean waves, or birds, that affect me and how I start playing music. I try to create music that sounds more like it's coming from a non-human entity or whatever. LL: Do you always start with some sort of sample from the natural world? LM: A lot of times. Not necessarily always, but a lot of the time. I try to not overdo it, because when I look back through the last three years I've done music, it's been basically all filled with nature samples. I'm going to try to cut down a little bit on that. I mean, I don't want my music to sound like a formula or something. "Oh yeah it's that guy, with his ocean waves and eerie melody." I just think it's inspiring. LL: So that's one of your aims for your next album is to move away from… LM: I don't know. I'll just see what happens. It could be. But now I'm gonna go live in Portugal on these islands called The Azores and I'm going to record an album there. So I'm afraid it will be the same thing again, because it's surrounded by ocean and wildlife. LL: Well it won't be the same thing… LM: No, probably not. But definitely the latest compositions I made are purely only instruments. Not like the live show, because you will hear it's filled with that whole sound. Exaggeratedly. LL: Your live show always is? LM: No. For a while I didn't do it but now I'm more into it because a lot of times my live shows are disconnected from my LPs. So in this show I try to create almost the exact environment that I do on my records. Which is filled with animal sounds and water. LL: Who is releasing your next record? LM: There's a record with installation music I've made for the art of Ada Van Hoorebeke coming out with Aguirre in May. Beyond that I'm not sure. I have to be in the right mindset. Sometimes, for half a year I cannot make music. When you don't have ideas you cannot do it. Or at least have the strength to combine and finalize ideas. To listen to a Dolphins Into The Future live set click here.

Ida is one of the founders and editors of this website. She tweets for Low Log and also has a tumblr. You can contact her at idajane[at]gmail.com.

more

Studio Exercise

by Maxwell Holyoke-Hirsch

2009

gouache, polymer resin

18 x 24 inches

Maxwell has exhibited around the world and illustrated for a range of clients including GQ, Virgin Records, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. Maxwell currently lives and works in New York City.
His most recent freelance and extracurricular work can be found at his website www.lorenholyoke.com.

more

Bingo

by Alex Fox

His fishing rod had been broken for months. He squatted, scribbling at the boards of his dock with a carpenter’s pencil. He had renamed himself Bingo Cartwheel when he was fifteen and didn’t tell anyone. He was thirty five now. Fishing was the only way Bingo could make sense of things. Writing about it was like lure fishing (spinners, jigs, cranks, plugs, spoons, buzzbaits, poppers)—which never worked for him—casting something made up out and hoping it came back with something real attached to it.

His limbs were long and didn’t look like they had been made for squatting like he was. His boots looked like a pair of anvils that had been welded to his spoke legs. His belt wasn’t holding up his pants despite the knot he’d tied it in after the buckle broke. He was going back over the letters with the pencil until the ruts of each letter shone with graphite.

In the shallows a little ways up the small river something was coming up to the surface. It was an oval the color of the moon but smooth like an egg. As it came ashore a bellybutton emerged, followed by limbs and a nose. He put down his pencil and walked over, boots sinking a few inches in the mud and making a sucking noise as he picked them up again.

He stood over a floating brown haired boy. Bingo looked at the face in the water. It looked like what happened to the boy hadn’t been so bad—his face didn’t make him look broken, just shut—like a closed book.

When Bingo still had the patience for books, he had read that there were deep sea vents—cracks in the ocean floor where heat and black poison gas from inside the earth escaped from twisted mineral chimneys. These vents were covered in plants and animals that had never seen the sun, and didn’t need it. They thrived on blistering hot, toxic smoke. He liked that, oddly colored, uncouth forms of life at the bottom of everything sucking up exhaust from the earth’s smoldering core. Creatures that would die if brought into the light.

The boy’s lips were purple and his skin looked like fresh, wet mozzarella with blue veins tangled in it. His expression made it look almost natural, as though this was just how he always looked. Bingo pretended that this was a special kind of boy who lived in the river and herded catfish. He pictured the boy standing in the river’s murk, watching catfish sift through the mud, or pulling them to a new pasture by their whiskers.

Bingo’s gaze wandered from the boy and past the shoreline trees and brush on up to the sky, all closed over with clouds the color of dirty snow. Though it wasn’t bright, the upward tilt of his head sent his eyelids closer together, like they were trying to whistle or play a trumpet. After a series of half thoughts that culminated in a slow wind he could feel blowing cold across his eyeballs, Bingo bent down and put his hands on the body’s shoulders and slipped the young shepherd back into the brown river.

Alex Fox is a writer living in his hometown of Berkeley, California. He has a tumblr that some of his friends read. He's super excited about his upcoming internship/trip to Costa Rica to help study turtles and jaguars in the Tortuguero Park. He can be reached at amfox@gm.slc.edu.

more

Snake Dance and Mountain Goats

by Stacey Rozich

Snake Dance

2010

watercolor, gouache, acrylic ink

15 x 21 inches

Mountain Goats

2010

watercolor, gouache, acrylic ink

15 x 21 inches

Stacey does most of her work at home, in a little white cottage in a Seattle district called Magnolia which is all residential: old folks, new families with tons of kids, running moms with strollers. She's been featured on the cover of Seattle's weekly alternative news paper The Stranger as well as Switzerland's design and art magazine Kinki, also Madrid's Gutenberg Quarterly and many blog features. She can be reached at Staceyrozich@gmail.com or by carrier pigeon.

more