Weddells: July Single Release

We started off this summer by releasing a track about a beautiful creature in our own backyard, the Ouzel. Our next release, Weddells, takes us to the far-reaches of the world. A place big enough to contain some really big questions. Planetudes is all about awakening wonder. But it’s also about asking questions.

A while back, we saw Werner Herzog’s film Encounters at the End of the World, in which Herzog travels to Antarctica to find out the answer to the question: who are these people who go to the ends of the earth, and why? Featured in the film were some of the most mysterious and beautiful sounds we had ever heard: the sounds of Weddell seals vocalizing under Antarctic ice, recorded by sound artist Douglas Quin.

These were the sounds that first planted the seed that has grown into Planetudes.

These seal sounds sent Duncan on a journey to find a sound world that could accompany their surreal beauty, which led him to dive head first into the world of analog synthesis. As Duncan says in his TEDx talk: “These are ancient sounds, though they sound futuristic…they sound inorganic, but they’re made by living seals. A kind of organic electronica."

Once we recognize sounds from non-human creatures as music, what then? Perhaps we’re one step closer to feeling the desire to change the ways in which our behaviors affect them.