A year after releasing
Luca Yupanqui
's
Sounds of the Unborn
, an album produced by translating the heartbeats of an unborn baby into sound waves,
Sacred Bones
issued
Conversations
, a remix album featuring several electronic and new age artists' interpretations of the material. A few of the contributors zone right in on those glitchy, rapid heartbeats.
Suzanne Ciani
naturally finds a way to make her synths flow with the rhythm, adding softly cooing vocals.
Morita Vargas
extracts a specific Morse code-like pattern and loops it, then fills the track with lush, multi-tracked vocals and rainforest-like sounds, with a somewhat ominous beat surfacing near the end.
Peaking Lights
previously featured their son
Mikko
on one of their albums shortly after he was born, and here the preteen returns to narrate a vibrating, dubbed-out house jam with lyrics about time and space. Several of the other artists seem to pick up on the eerie, unsettling qualities of the source material. Twin Peaks sound editor
Dean Hurley
turns the heartbeats into helicopter blades and footsteps trudging through a snowy field, and
Hiro Kone
interjects some unexpected movements and bursts into a magical sonic space.
Laraaji
constructs a canopy of natural sounds, from babbling water to distant bird calls, and lets gentle, detached zither melodies float in the center. Like a few other selections here, the mix barely resembles its source material, but it all shares the same spirit of creation. ~ Paul Simpson