Marine seismic data completely blows our minds. It’s essentially a picture of the subsurface that geophysicists use to predict where oil might be hidden, but how it comes into being is just a WHIZ BANG. Try and picture this: you get a ship (though with some techniques you need up to four) and then put one to six tails behind it, each up to about ten kilometers long with microphones (hydrophones) spread evenly along the lines, which are ballasted to operate at a depth just below the surface. Then, back on the boat, you have this massive air gun that shoots an extremely high-pressure bubble into the water (so high pressure, in fact, that if it was on the deck and accidentally went off when you were standing near it, you would be literally shredded to bits in an instant).

When the bubble ‘pops’ in the water, it sends a shockwave through the sea towards the ocean bottom, and part of the energy reflects back once it makes contact with it. But the remainder of the sonic wave penetrates the earth, and each time it encounters a new layer, it reflects back yet another part of the energy (the earth looks like a layer cake when you slice it open, with each layer being made up of its own particular set of characteristics and physical properties).

HELPFUL DIAGRAM

So that reflected sound, subsequently, is captured by the hydrophones on those tails behind the boat, and then that signal, along with precise time and location information, is fed into a computer on the ship that assembles it all together for the next stage of the process. And this happens every few seconds. And they do this around the clock for literally weeks in a row as the boat moves slowly along. Yet as freaking complicated as that whole process is (can you imagine turning a boat around that has some miles-long crap hanging off the end of it?), it’s nearly stepchild to the level of SCIENCE required for what comes next: Signal processing and imaging.

(Aside before we move on: each of these boats has atleast one person on them whose job it is to be on the lookout for marine mammals. That’s right, they sit around all day and get to look for dolphins and whales. We kinda want this job, especially now that we have this record to use as a soundtrack for it.)

So, now you’ve got a literal warehouse full of data (back when it used to be recorded on magnetic tape. Oh yeah, love that vintage analog exploration data), you’ve got to make some sense of that. A big part of this is dealing with all the signal variation and interference and other processes that occur in nature because what you want to get back to is the purest, most un-affected signal that you can. It ain’t easy. There’s signals that bounce into each other, false reflections, surface clutter, and just the general clusterduckery that, as you might imagine, occurs when you try to record sound being bounced off a rock thousands of feet below the earth thousands of feet under water.

So the science of processing, then, is to go through and remove all that baloney. To take the equivalent of hundreds of guitars playing a ten hour long solo and using all manner of plugins that will likely never be affordable for Pro-Tools to strip away the reverb, delay, distortion, flange, chorus, echo and other hubbabaloo from each track. One note at a time.

In a sense, it’s the opposite of recording a band like Golden Cities. We imagine them to be the sound that got away. That rather than reflect upward, they pushed ever further into more and more distant geologic eras, gathering reverb, echo and delay as they pushed further through the Mesozoic to the Paleozic right on through to the Precambrian (and good lord, could they please take out Brendan Frasier on the way down). Further and further back in time they push, eventually to before God moved over the void and the nothingness and the darkness and the deep that became Earth. To where there is only space, and time is ill defined. There they float in the ether, eventually lining up with some space dust here or there. And the slow grind of time passes and they return to the present, falling as Perseids Meteors into a studio to record their experiences in the form of a self titled record.

Not so much a stretch considering they recorded this album during that particular celestial event. Golden Cities sounds old, like time drawn out from a tightly twisted nest of wire. Though almost entirely instrumental, it’s nothing like crescendo core and contains no hint of the metal or mathy angularism we’ve come to expect from the lyricless lately. We haven’t heard much like it since 7% Solution’s All About Satellites and Spaceships, a ten year old release that we still count among our favorites and yet one that sits in relative tonal isolation in our record collection (if you can suggest other stuff that sounds like these, PLEASE do). This is the perfect record for contemplating the deeper mysteries of deep earth or deep space, or for contemplating nothing at all. Either way, Recommended.