dolphins into the future: ...on sea-faring isolation

This is the long-awaited CD release of Dolphins Into The Future's acclaimed cult 2009 LP ...On Sea-Faring Isolation, an album previously released on cassette by Lieven Martens' own label, Cetacean Nation, and on vinyl by Not Not Fun. In addition to the original tracklisting, the Fonal reissue includes a 15-minute bonus track "Various Possible Notes And Timbres Of The Mental Unit Molecule," recorded in 2011 on Okapoka Island. Dolphins Into The Future is one Lieven Martens, a Belgian currently living in the Azores, who has since 2007 steadily released a number of albums, EPs, 7"s and tapes on a variety of labels. Often mentioned in the same breath as contemporaries Skaters or Oneohtrix Point Never, Dolphin's vision is as smudged and somnambulant, but very much of itself. Amorphous and carefully framed, Martens' sound landscapes place field recordings and lo-fi instrumentation on a democratic plane, to create one seamless mass of bubbling, percussive flow. But if Martens taps into a pool of tropical references (as he undoubtedly does), such influences are relayed from an unashamedly outside perspective -- a deliberate refraction of nature, a re-imagined idyll, that shows him to be as close in spirit to the Romantics, or perhaps even film-maker Jean Painlevé's surreal take on aquatic life. Martens expands: "I create Cetacean Transfers. Dreamt by places like, Ho'okena, Ilha Das Flores, São João Do Pico, and Kealakekua. All the patterns, tones and harmonies are inspired by Nature's Tongue. The music is meant as a two dimensional (left, right, stereo) sound picture. A metaphorical landscape in which you could hike, or just stand by and relax. You're the Ruckenfigur. Watching a dramatic environment. And in analogy with this metaphor, I use various recorded elements of nature and sound, and re-create them into a new, Utopian Landscape. Like the deep minds of the Golden Age of Science Fiction, I prefer Beauty above suspense. In essence, my music is not synth music nor new age. It's more affiliated with landscape painting. And romantic poetry. Or poetic cinema. The bonus track, added especially for this compact disc, is the inner feedback. An epilogue on dry land. After the waking-sleep pick up, the proceedings are spinning forward in the deep kernel of our Bio Computer, in which radiates our stable core, The Mental Unit. This Unit is our heart and our center and remains with us during the whole of our incarnation. This additional audio experiment is a randomized poem on its various possible tunes, octaves and timbres."