#norm chambers

Norm Chambers - Seaside Resonance - pleasantly burbling synths (with a couple vaguely menacing tracks in case you get too relaxed)

SIDETRACKED

(Side Projects, Solo Albums, and Other Detours)

Jürgen Müller - Science Of The Sea

In 2011, Digitalis Recordings presented a newly unearthed gem: a reissue of a ambient electronic album from the late ‘70s recorded by Jürgen Müller. After an undersea research excursion, Müller (then a oceanic sciences student at the University of Kiel) purchased some early synthesizers and set up a studio on his houseboat. Inspired by pioneering electronic composers and the then nascent new age scene, he set about recording an album inspired by his underwater travels. Though he hoped to license the music for appropriately aquatic-themed documentaries, the recordings never received much interest apart from family and friends. Müller wound up focusing on his career in the sciences and Science Of The Sea wound up forgotten until it was rediscovered and reissued.

All of that, if you haven’t already guessed, was a lie.

Instead, Jürgen Müller and his misbegotten gem of album was the invention of electronic musician Norm Chambers, a bit of musical dress up that transcends a simple pseudonym. For a while there, though, there was genuine uncertainty about whether or not the story was legit. Even The Evil Empire tagged the record as a Best New Reissue. 

As far as hoaxes go, I’d call it an unusually successful one, both in terms of how many people fell for it, and in the sense that it’s actually kind of a fun / funny idea. The tradition of artists presenting their own work as a piece of detritus they happened upon is a long one. The Scarlet Letter, Candide, Either/Or, The Name of the Rose, and The Blair Witch Project all played with similar conceits. The use of a fictional name and history allows Chambers to play with the way that listeners approach and consider his work.

It helps, of course, that Science Of The Sea is a nice little record, regardless of the story that surrounds it. If you’re a fan of what I (lovingly) call “new age bullshit” you’ll find a lot to love here. The record is full of twinkling arpeggios and washes of burbling synthesizers. There are moments that sound like tiny bubbles floating up from a seabed, and others that sound like flecks of light glinting off the ripples of surface at sunset. Listening to it, you can definitely understand how many people were persuaded by it’s fictional backstory. It’s gentle, soothing, and inviting. 

And what’s a little fiction between friends.

- TWG

PS: I’m glad that this record isn’t on Spotify or Soundcloud, forcing me to link to a YouTube recording of it from Altered Zones (!) the Pitchfork-spinoff blog collective that was equal parts laughable, unnecessary, and kind of great.

N. Chambers Yuki Particle (2018)

N Chambers Itinerant Pattern (2018)