Arthur King's Changing Landscapes was performed and recorded in a Chilean copper mine. I want to pause there because this fact was what drew me into the album. A mine is a unique setting for a creative project with a sonic potential that is worth exploring, but it goes deeper than that. He could have recorded many other places to get a deep, resonating sound, but he chose this location and it served a purpose. It left an undeniable psychographic imprint on the work. Mines are not natural places. They are human incursions into non-hospitable terrain- a kind of terraforming of the interior of the Earth. A process of injecting the wants and needs of our civilization as well as the instruments and architecture of modernity into ancient formations that pre-date humanity itself. They represent an infiltration of impossible space wherein humans set up residence in corridors of stone flesh- an expedition into the darker recesses of the imagination that is made possible by the expansion of our environment through excavation. They're places of both awe and disorientation, eerie and inspiring at the same time, and it is this synergy that Changing Landscapes embodies. Through spans of interlacing percussion, wondering navigational flutes and a clanging toil of suggestive atmospherics, Arthur King cultivates grooves that harmonize with the processes of geological time in a transcendent conversation with the chthonic anatomy upon which all else rests and from which we all ultimately rely on for subsistence. The frequent use of recursive murmuring percussion suggests the jostling and function of great pressure-forged, quarts organs while the whispering interludes consciously recall the phantasmal interiority of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, illuminating a spiritual component while proposing a living presence much older than any mortal interloper. Changing Landscapes is revealing in its structural ambitions, showing the life of a world below the procrustean layer we inhabit, while unlocking the penetrating nature of our perception and uncovering an abiding potential to find harmony in the hidden place of the cosmic body we call home.
