What does Innovative Landscapes Laboratory sound like?

A wildly experimental hub of electroacoustic sounds that provide mood, not melody.

The review of ‘Spontaneous Dimensions’ by Innovative Landscapes Laboratory

What happens when you ignore any sense of melody and focus entirely on sound design to create experimental mood palettes? That is what Innovative Landscapes Laboratory homes in on with their new album ‘Spontaneous Dimensions’. These experimental improvisations are elemental melting pots of hundreds of different sounds captured and laid bare for the listener. This is sound that is almost unreviewable.

Innovative Landscapes Laboratory – cover art by Evan Crankshaw

Instead, I’ll focus on the concept of this album. It focuses on something called Musique Concrète. It is a genre of electroacoustic “music” that is made from acousmatic sound. Acousmatic sound is sound created from something that you’ll need to guess what thing is creating the sound. Sometimes it is instruments, other times it is sound found in the world and often things are manipulated out of context. ‘Spontaneous Dimensions’ takes this concept to the nth degree, creating worlds of sound to explore.

‘Obake Trigger’ is like an ASMR song for gas sounds. Playful bubbles of water trickle, gurgle and splash around the speakers with surprise. They’re interspersed with weird percussion and reverb rumbles, violin string scratches and all kinds of synth twists. No wonder it’s got ‘trigger’ in the title!

‘The Rite’ is like an ice cavern and an electric power station are having a conversation back and forth. The icy metallic tones early on give way to tonal frequency drones. ‘Unstable Limbo’ sounds more wind elemental, with radio frequencies being plugged in and out of the mix. Static spits and orchestral hits being sucked into new dimensions like a washing machine bring the unstable element as a lone bell siren rings out like a distant primal scream.

After spending the first three tracks wondering what on earth we’re listening to ‘Catatonic Wandering’ gives at least a bit of grounding. This track uses percussion, piano and glassy reverbs to provide a kaleidoscope of disorientation. It is the only track with tonal qualities and evokes a lost-in-a-head-maze feeling with some very clever vocal manipulation. In a very experimental album, this is probably the easiest track to start with. This leaves us with the 12-minute closer ‘Maze of Distorted Dimensions’. It is a tour-de-force of the four previous tracks with plenty of additional abstract noises thrown in to create an undercurrent of peril.

I can’t score this album. I won’t even try. Innovative Landscapes Laboratory has created an interdimensional album of twisted sound and your journey will be very personal to you. I found myself attributing elements to each of the tracks. Whilst I was certainly never bored, I did struggle with the atmospherics-only approach to this genre of music. I don’t think I could listen to Musique Concrète. With the lights off and the imagination running riot, it did spark some great imagery in the mind though. One for the thoughtful avant-garde sound lovers among us!

Recommended track: Obake Trigger

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