Like his debut album from 2016, the latest from Toronto producer Ceramic TL—better known as Egyptrixx—deals with the geopolitics of environmental catastrophe. A collaboration in experimental sound work with Istanbul composer Ipek Gorgun, Perfect Lung contains a song called “The Story of Our Salvation” that is only three-and-a-half-minutes long (a little short, maybe, considering the subject matter). For now, a story of salvation from eco-crisis does not exist. Or rather, it does not exist for anyone besides the world’s most powerful populations. So the track’s universal narrative is a speculative placeholder that may never come to fruition. It is pointedly followed on the album by “Magnitude of Oblivion, Refrain of Pacific Calm.”
Sitting down with Perfect Lung requires the listener to brace themselves a bit. The fractured edges of its amorphous synth textures glitter and ooze, sloshing around as if miles below the earth’s surface. And yet, entering the record’s sonic space is like being in the cabin of an airplane as it makes its final descent, straining the inner ear’s air pressure levels. Discomfort mixes with nagging elation. On his last record, Sign of the Cross Every Mile to the Border, Ceramic TL made a point of using every nook and cranny of the sonic spectrum, and this one is comparably expansive.
Sign of the Cross set out to investigate the philosophical implications of the anthropocene, and this record continues the project by zoning in on more micro musical details. Gorgun is currently nearing the completion of her Ph.D. in Sonic Arts at Istanbul Technical University, and it seems like her ear for granular, protean detail—evidenced on her remarkable debut LP, Aphelion—is partly responsible for this shift. Sequenced arpeggios nudged out of shape are all over “We Lack the Clout the Decision Isn’t Ours to Make, There Was No Crusade After All,” cut through by harsh noise in a process of embattled symbiosis. “The Story of Our Salvation” moves by way of cascading textures, evoking pastoral electronica that grows queasy. In these moments, Perfect Lung feels like it is genuinely in conversation with the present. Elsewhere, when neon ’80s synth enter the frame, it inevitably evokes something like the Blade Runner soundtrack and feels more rehearsed, less imaginative.
What is a “perfect lung”? One thinks of homeostasis, the careful management of inputs and outputs, the immense labor of care. In an interview, Gorgun said it is “representative of a full breath, something that changes your whole existence once you breathe the air in with awareness, and something that is subliminally marketed under the category of wellness in a world literally coughing up polluted air.” With that, Perfect Lung embodies both speculative science fiction and a vérité-style depiction of the present. It chooses not to solely mourn dystopia, and yet—opting for complexity over convenient tidiness—it couldn’t be characterized as optimistic either. Like the remotely trembling currents that collide in the work’s sonic ecosystem, Perfect Lung remains torn by the sense of pervasive volatility.
