DEC 7—"A Guided Sublimation (Movements)" in New Ear :: Spatial

“A Guided Sublimation (Movements)” is a limited-edition vinyl and print box set. The edition features music and imagery from “A Guided Sublimation”, Laura Splan’s multisensory planetarium experience that was commissioned by the Vanderbilt Museum in 2023. Splan’s practice is deeply collaborative, working with a diversity of musicians, scientists, and engineers to generate layered elements of sound. Splan’s composition of MIDI instruments, vocals, and guitar oscillates between goopy and glitchy, soothing and unsettling offering a sonic meditation situated in a liminal space that is at once biological and technological.

The double disk vinyl LP set features an ethereal soundscape created from sonifications generated by theoretical biophysicist Adam Lamson using data from his computational simulations of molecular processes. Splan composed the resulting sound files into MIDI instrument arrangements. Biotech lab instrumentation engineer and musician Frank Masciocchi created an electric guitar composition inspired by a symphonic structure with four movements. Heavy metal musician Jared Warren (Big Business, Melvins) contributed vocals that permeate select moments in the movements. This special vinyl version of the soundscape was produced in collaboration with arts technologist KamranV of CyKiK using Phonocut, a unique push button vinyl recording device he developed. The double disc LP has a running time of approximately twenty minutes.

The metallic chromogenic print portfolio, “Rose Portals”, features a series of five stills from the full dome planetarium animations. The kaleidoscopic images are reminiscent of the rose windows of gothic cathedrals with their radially symmetrical rearrangements of molecular imagery from the animations in “A Guided Sublimation”.