Antwerp-based Lieven Martens (aka Lieven Moana) is the Jacques Mayol of the contemporary New Age set. Martens has traded under the Dolphins Into the Future name since a self-titled cassette release in 2007, ultimately gaining wider attention with his …On Sea-Faring Isolation LP for Not Not Fun in 2009. His music ripples with such calm oceanic splendor that it makes last year's high-benchmark release in the genre, Jürgen Müller's Science of the Sea, sound like Einsturzende Neubauten in comparison. Dolphins Into the Future's sound is divined from a split of Martens' own field recordings, gentle twists from his armory of analog and digital synths, and influences extracted from gamelan and exotica, often simply working as a way of recreating the undersea world with which he is so enchanted. Actual music sometimes plays a secondary role; when "Jardim Dos Tufaos" from Canto Arquipélago is halfway through, a recording of waves lapping at a beachfront is deployed, subtly nudging the Dolphins Into the Future aesthetic to its logical end point.
Like many artists operating in calmer waters in the post-noise underground, Martens is highly prolific. This album comes at approximately the same time as a cassette-only release for NNA Tapes, A Star Maker, Strange Dreams & Clairvoyance, and a reissue of …On Sea-Faring Isolation on the Finnish label Fonal Records. His own Cetacean Nation label, itself a subsidiary of Martens' Taped Sounds, is similarly bountiful in its output. This record, conceived as "an audio poem for the Açores" according to its maker, was appropriately recorded in a small fishing town, São João, on the island of Pico off the coast of Portugal. It's a less dense recording than …On Sea-Faring Isolation, with huge gaps opening up in the sound, often vanishing into complete silence. There's a greater reliance on Martens' field recordings too, sometimes in a curiously disruptive manner. A piece of beach sound and bird song is cleaved into "Noite" with scant regard for the pace or direction of the track, making it feel like Martens was gripped by a sudden ADD-like impulse to meddle.
Such diversions only occur irregularly-- for the most part, Canto Arquipélago is an intensely minimal piece, barely perceptible in places, occasionally rugged in others. But it's when those frequency jams split the songs into two, three, or four parts that things really get interesting. "Verde" is positively epileptic in its approach, handing over from calmed tone-drift to a raw lo-fi recording of muffled drum sounds, ending up in a sparse (and amusing) call-and-response duet between a synth and a nearby bird. In his excellent 2011 LA Times piece on the New Age revival, Pitchfork contributor Andy Beta spoke to Douglas Mcgowan of Yoga Records, who hypothesized that the genre could be satiating a desire to escape from constant-click culture, calling it "the opposite of checking your Facebook every two minutes." What separates Dolphins Into the Future's work from Martens' peers is hearing strands from the contemporary world leaking in, propelled by a fidgety desire to not get too settled into the straight path he could so easily embark upon.
But Canto Arquipélago, spread over six tracks with a 35-minute runtime, only sporadically inspires. Sometimes Martens does take the straight path, and when he does, with umpteen similarly minded Dolphins Into the Future releases trailing behind him, it starts to feel like he's painting himself into a corner. On the lengthy "Levante", Martens is coasting, dipping into territory he's covered so extensively before that coming back for more just feels like he's circling a sparsely populated stretch of ocean, staring emptily into his own reflection. It's a mesh of ambient fluttering and prods of spacey synth drones, laid out for dolphin-like squeaks and gurgles to rise and fall over the top. It might sound churlish to complain about an act called Dolphins Into the Future leaning too hard on dolphin noise for its central stylistic force, but as this record proves elsewhere, it's when Martens plugs up the desire to take the tried and tested route that he loosens a few of the unwanted barnacles from his sound.
