Review Summary: Urban Space and Electronic Music (Part II) - Everythingrush of the Future-Present
This short series is dedicated to charting the relationship between electronic music and urban space. As a theme, it's not remotely original – you'll have come across the
modern soundtrack for modern spaces line however many times – but rather than being put off by its use as a generic parallel, I wanted to use it to explore a small handful of records on their own terms, together with the very distinct perspectives on city space they offer on city space.
Anyhow, long with everything else about the record,
Blue Planet's urban snapshot is so steeped in '90s future-nostalgia that it's impossible to envision it as a real location for more than a handful of seconds. Its pristine Goa trance transforms the city into an accelerated mecha fantasy, scaled and paced like a transcendent, airborne ideal birthed from the dreams of its inhabitants — it zips over the streets and directly up buildings, weaving through traffic and ducking under bridges, its navigation at once fantastically seamless yet tethered in the wonder of a human-centric standpoint.
Anyone who's been momentarily awed by tomorrow's architecture, transport or technology should be able to find their footing here. Personally,
Blue Planet whisks me back to visiting London as an eight-year-old and marvelling at the Gherkin as some kind of extraterrestrial construct (has an edifice so phallic ever corkscrewed so sleekly?) to my first time withstanding Tokyo or Seoul fluorescent blasts of high-rise ecstasy, or to witnessing residents of a Shenzhen apartment complex unlock the their front door with facial biometrics while bored high-schoolers killed time outside by forcing a police robot to spin in circles through its collision-shy motion sensors. It may not have lasted long, but each of those occasions afforded me a few giddy moments of genuinely believing I'd stepped into the future; their state-of-the-art sheen was so dazzling that, just for a moment, my entire conception of the city found itself refracted through the lens of their glistening ultramodernity.
Blue Planet takes the momentary rush of those impressions and sustains it as a 75-minute pocket of fantasy. When the time is ripe for full-throttle ecstasy it holds nothing back, yet it somehow evokes a great sense of spaciousness at every turn, per the respective slow burn and mysterious wind-down of bookends “Apex” and “Arcana”. This is a rare trance record that invites its audience to carve out an existence inside it – or project one over it – rather than simply hold on for dear life: even when it blasts into squelching acid climaxes, it somehow preserves a crispness, an airiness that distinguishes it from the overstimulated meltdowns of Goa adjacencies Dimension 5, Astral Projection and Hallucinogen. The epic "Alidade" is a revelation to this end, its surging excesses laid out over such a patient progression that every epileptic touch folds seamlessly into a brisk walking pace (just you try strolling to this!) The same goes for the iconic “Crystal”, arguably Blue Planet Corporation’s signature tune: it may be a gold standard among cinematic linear builds, but its greater appeal is the way it maps its hyper-energised rush across a consistent, inhabitable wavelength, providing the frictionless mobility of an overhead drone shot without estranging itself from the pedestrians it flits over.
This inhabitability stretches to both extremes of
Blue Planet’s spectrum: its most intense track “Atoll” is arguably its most introspective and humane, its vision less that of an overblown panorama than of a single, pounding heartbeat, while the lounge-ready highlight "Roma" brings up the chill end, its lackadaisical motifs wafted over daydream tempo. Blue Planet Corporation makes deceptively versatile work of anchoring the album in approachable standpoints as such, and its future-kitsch is never alienating — for all the
Corporation of the artist's name, the futuristic suggestions here are overwhelmingly utopic, pleasantly removed from noir, cyberpunk, or other pollutant capitalism.
So much the better. Perhaps this is why, almost three decades since its release, this is still
the album I turn to for futuristic metropolitan aesthetics. Like so much of the best trance, it takes a generous suspension of disbelief to get the best of it, but no amount of new age cliches, video game associations and galaxy-minded rave hangovers could ground the flights of imagination it inspires with its meticulous builds and ecstatic highs. There’s something oddly affirmative in its dated palette, something that substantiates its futuristic vision beyond anything I can imagine from a contemporary artist — perhaps the calcified remains of past outlooks on the future are simply more comforting and tangible than present-day conjecture. Whatever the case,
Blue Planet's idealised urban playground is as elating as such things come.
Urban Space and Electronic Music
[url=https://www.sputnikmusic.com/review/89637/Illuvia-Earth-Prism/]Part 1: Illuvia - Earth Prism[/url]
Part 2: Blue Planet Corporation - Blue Planet
