Our Mission

At once vast and intimate, Melting Planets draws the listener into an immersive soundworld where nature behaves in unexpected ways: drops of rain might sound like a fusion of glassy, metal, wooden, plastic, and electric pops, while gravity shifts in multiple directions, causing bursts of sound to appear, vanish, and continuously descend into the unknown.

The album is the result of two years of musical and extramusical dialogue between three composers/improvisers – Sivan Cohen Elias (sound instruments/ objects, voice, live electronics), Lauren Siess (viola, objects, no-input mixer), and Cole Blouin (electric guitar, objects). Their collaboration culminated in this recording, artistically directed and produced by Sivan Cohen Elias.

The album embraces dynamic, visceral music, conceptualized as musical “scenes” set in fictional worlds undergoing surreal ecological collapse. Within these apocalyptic environments, new hybrid lifeforms begin to emerge. The trio imagined what might survive in an environment defined by constant, extreme transformations – shifting from extreme heat to deep freezes, from dryness to overwhelming humidity. They explored the evolution of a new physics and the struggles for survival that might emerge in such a world. What kinds of creatures would exist? They pictured hybrids of disproportionate, absurd body parts, and speculated on those creatures’ behaviors and interactions. In so doing, the trio discovered the absurdity of this world – its pain, its humor, its complexity, its hope, and its cycles.

On the sonic level, the album presents an intricate, electronic-heavy sound-world that deliberately defies genre classification. The imagery emerged through an ongoing dialogue with their collection of instruments and sound-making devices, which were blended in real-time using digital sound processing. The trio fused elements of classical, multicultural, and electronic instruments with unconventional objects (a complete list is below), while the live electronic manipulations transformed them into immersive, experiential sounds – inviting the listener to perceive the sound itself almost as a physical body, ensuring that the sound had the feeling of melting. One section of the album focuses on a drowning creature – a three-track piece that demands active listening, such that the listener can fully experience the creature’s voice, actions, emotions, and surroundings. It begins with a kazoo and viola mirroring each other in long, bending tones, recalling a desperate cry. Meanwhile, birdlike sounds emerge from electronic manipulations of a bowed fishing line tied around the guitar strings. As the piece unfolds, bubbling water and thick mud are sonically conjured through vibrating devices and a no-input mixer, gradually transforming into a soundscape of melting and drowning. The section culminates in a visceral, choral-like tutti performed on flute piccolo, bowed electric guitar, and viola.

The trio began improvising together in late 2021. In the summer of 2022, just before Siess left for composition studies in Dresden, Germany, and Cohen Elias departed for a teaching position at the University of Minnesota, they decided to record an album. From that session, one track stood out—Scoby Song—the only piece from that recording to make it onto the album. Its name reflects its role as a foundational element, a kind of starter culture for the material they continued to develop remotely over the following year. Throughout discussions, the trio kept returning to ideas of sonic walls, fermentation, unknown cultural sound, and the concept of sound melting. The long, frozen chord at the end of Scoby Song, along with the use of the kazoo and saxophone mouthpiece as tools for personification, became central motifs that evolved further as they worked towards the second recording session.

In the summer of 2023, the trio members reunited in NYC and rehearsed at Studio Fog Expanse, Cole’s recording and production space in Ridgewood, Queens, where they continued developing sonic “scenes” by forming a sequence of specified actions and reflected images while improvising the details, nuances, and musical flow. Over two intense days at Greyfade Studio, in Mount Vernon, New York, they recorded multiple takes of those scenes, along with free improvisations working in the same sonic atmospheres, and techniques. This session generated a wealth of material, which Cohen Elias later sorted, selected, and edited. Working with the phenomenal engineer Joseph Branciforte during postproduction – recording, mixing, and mastering – brought the album to life with the exact crispness, clarity, and immersive quality Cohen Elias had envisioned.

Consolation is a song cycle composed by Samn Johnson for vocalist Tis Kaoru Zamler-Carhart, setting Latin poetry from Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy. It features layers of Tis’s voice accompanied by Samn’s electronics and instrumental recordings.

Boethius wrote the Consolation in 524 AD while awaiting execution after his political downfall. He is visited in prison by the feminine allegorical character of Philosophy. Through their imagined dialogue, it is apparent that both characters are in fact himself, both male and female, both free and captive, facing his own questions about his life choices: money, fame, power—did they make him happy?

Consolation—the album—has been described by composer and music critic Alex Temple as “wildly polystylistic,” but the same can perhaps be said of Boethius’s original. Its mix of poetry and prose carried ancient readers along in the visceral flow of Latin meter, careening between intellectual elegance and sheer terror. Samn’s music hews closely to the maelstrom of Boethius’s emotions, but renders it with different devices. Tis’s voice, the backbone of the album, is pushed to virtuosic limits of range and timbre, spanning over four octaves with an astonishing array of colors and tuning systems. Interviewed by WMBR radio about Samn’s writing for the trans nonbinary voice, Tis says:

Around Tis’s voice, Samn’s electronic orchestra deploys echoes of Renaissance polyphony alongside 808 kick drums and synthesizers, flashes of romanticism, and washes of ambience. Early tuning systems—from Just Intonation to Meantone temperaments—are omnipresent in Samn’s music. For Boethius, who was also a music theorist, these would have not only been shimmering worlds of musical color, but allegories for how the cosmos is ordered. Perhaps the same is ultimately true for Samn, and is part of what binds him to Boethius across the centuries.

Describing this connection, Samn says, “When I first read the Consolation, it immediately drew me in. The practical philosophy felt so accessible, and the huge range of emotion and poetic rhythm was an exciting challenge to adapt. I knew this would push me to draw on a similar range of musical styles, and writing for Tis, whose voice transcends the gendered categories of classical vocal music, felt perfectly aligned with this aim. It’s also a vehicle to explore my religious and spiritual thoughts. We know from other sources that Boethius was a Christian, yet he does not evoke explicitly Christian concepts in his Consolation, instead describing God in the terms of neoplatonic philosophy. Whatever his intent may have been, I find this lack of doctrine to impart an appealing universality to his message, and is part of what makes me want to adapt it for the world I live in. In this text, written from prison, I find something transcendent and liberatory.”

Samn Johnson(he/they) is a composer, producer, and historical linguist. Their work often harnesses research on acoustics and historical phonology to set texts in ancient languages like Latin, Old English, Hittite, and Gothic. Samn has written for a range of performers including Chromic Duo, Righteous GIRLS, and harpsichordist Nathan Mondry. His latest two recordings, both self-released, are Ageless Sea (2022), for chamber choir, chamber orchestra, electronics, and rock band, and First Book for Piano (2022), performing his own piano works. Samn is also half of the synth pop duo Acraea, together with Leora Mandel. He holds degrees in composition from the University of Michigan and NYU, and has taken courses in Indo-European historical linguistics at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. Samn lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where this album was recorded. (www.samnjohnsonmusic.com</…) 

Tis Kaoru Zamler-Carhart (they/them) is a singer, composer, writer, designer, visual artist, and medievalist. Tis regularly works with composers who write specifically for their voice. Tis’s own composition output includes opera, chamber. and vocal music, and has been performed around the world. Tis’s books are published by Punctum Books and revolve around Africa, Byzantium, and the fragile boundaries of seriousness (Vitaly Zamler, is on display in New York and Brussels, and has been exhibited across Africa and Europe (The Royal Conservatoire in The Hague and Parsons School of Design in New York.

Equal parts surreal and fantastic, Goldfeather’s new album, Change, leaps forward into a dynamic and effervescent sound world. Texturally dense and poetically resonant, the closest comparison could be if Laurie Anderson decided to make a Hyperpop album. The record ricochets between harsh, in-your-face electronics to beautifully rich orchestration, relaying a deeply visceral story along the way. Each song has a catchy melody that is underscored by unusual vocal and electronic effects and unpredictable key and time signature changes. 

Change is an album that tells the story of volatile emotions, loss, and growth within an unraveling relationship. It boomerangs from feelings ranging from insecurity, helplessness, despair, anxiety, rage, remorse, and at the end, the painfully ecstatic joy of a protagonist who has faced her demons and rooted herself in resilience. 

Goldfeather is an experimental pop band based out of New York City. The whimsical brainchild of Sarah Goldfeather and Mike Tierney, Goldfeather’s music has been described as “a nightmare funhouse-mirror take on Carly Rae Jepson-style upbeat pop [that is] deeply disconcerting and outrageously fun” (National Sawdust Log), “full of light and life” (The Current, Minnesota Public Radio), and “poignant…striking and laudable” (The Deli Magazine). Sarah and Mike have led rich and eclectic musical careers that inform their music. Sarah is currently the violinist for Lincoln Center Theater’s Production of Coastal Starlight and was the 2019-2020 violin chair for Tony-winning and Grammy-nominated Broadway production of Oklahoma!. She has made television appearances including The Tonight Show, The Today Show, The 2019 Tony Awards, has been a featured artist in series across the US and Europe, including TEDxMET, and has performed with notable artists such as Courtney Love, Lizzo, Ronnie Spector, and Kimbra. She is the artistic director of the ensemble Exceptet and a composer of chamber works commissioned by ETHEL quartet, Contemporaneous, pianist Timo Andres, and more. Mike is a three-time Grammy-nominated audio engineer and producer based in Brooklyn who has worked with a range of artists across genres, including Steve Reich, Medeski Martin & Wood; Stephen Stills; Julia Wolfe; Pharaoh Sanders; Judy Collins; and Alarm Will Sound. He currently works out of his studio, Shiny Things Studio.