Volcano Lazerbeam: Union

Boutique Los Angeles label, Bathysphere Records, has been another recent find thanks to their first international release, Winterwood’s Caelestis. Now at a catalogue that runs 11 deep and counting, each one has garnered pleasant results to the ear, and the label’s latest release is yet another: Volcano Lazerbeam’s Union.

The Los Angeles-based husband and wife duo of multi-instrumentalist, Cristina Cano (Siren and the Sea), and audio-engineer / sound designer, Justin Longerbeam (Fog Net, Alan Graves), create spiritual dreamscapes inspired by open spaces and comfortable solitude.

While their self-released debut was likened to enduring floaty head music in a chrysalis, their Bathysphere debut sees the pair showcasing the kind of dynamic soundscapes that opens portals to new possibilities. An album already enticing on the back of its beautiful artwork, the compositions prove a worthy match to this tranquility.

And with a title like Horizon, Volcano Lazerbeam intersect sonic serenity with visual imagery, and via lush synths and ungirded drones, a filmic backdrop forms as a vital through line. (This continues later during the equally thrilling Flame.)

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On At Sea, Cano and Longerbeam unfurl an array of soft synths that ride across a drone that sounds like the pair performing up against an industrial fan. It’s a juxtaposition that echoes a similar aesthetic to what fellow Los Angles-based experimentalists, Awakened Souls, achieved earlier this year with their latest release, unlikely places.

Meanwhile, the wonderful hymnal drone that is landing Landing boasts the kind of stirring repetition that excavates down to the pits of the soul. So too Dusk. Both emotive and rich in sound, Dusk is a meditative, shoreline drone that banishes all the worries that come with living in such a fast-paced world. An endorphin rush endured purely through transcendental sonics.

Which is something that closing composition, Sunrise, is not. An organ-based wave of sound that stirs up the embers of dark moments once lived. Like a once familiar voice reaching you from another world, it’s that moment that pulls the past back into the present, embodying creative power and what it can achieve.

Sunrise pinpoints that kind of thought-provoking moment Cano and Longerbeam aspire to achieve with Union. Here the duo find a liminal space between illusion and realism and just for that fleeting moment, it’s a place that actually exists. That union, and from the album’s title to the artwork and the actual compositions, everything is purely transparent. Essentially, it’s a record in every sense.

Union is out now via Bathysphere Records. Purchase from Bandcamp.