New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Today, Cool Maritime - the project of Sean Hellfritsch - announces a new album Big Earth Energy, out on May 20 as his debut on Western Vinyl, and shares its lead single "Temporal Dryft." The album, Hellfritsch's first full-length release since his 2018 record Sharing Waves, plumbs the depths of his multimedia mind and naturalist heart, spinning an impressionistic narrative world off of cultural touchstones like the PC game MYST and the work of Japanese composers like Hiroshi Yoshimura, Yoichiro Yoshikawa and Studio Ghibli's Joe Hisaishi. Using those inspirations and guided by Hellfritsch's experience as an animator and filmmaker, Big Earth
Energy is the soundtrack to a hypothetical video game with a pointedly ecological premise and a twist of psychedelic charm.
In Hellfritsch's imagined virtual journey, the player assumes the perspective of a treefrog 65 million years ago, hopping epochs with each new level, forming a comprehensive picture of the massive changes the planet has gone through over eons. The ultimate goal of the game is not to amass resources, defeat enemies, or gain power, but to fully witness the unfolding of one of the biggest systems of energy imaginable, or as the Hellfritsch puts it, "to explore the incomprehensibly vast energetic expression and mystery that is Earth." The album is steeped in exploratory RPG intrigue, possibility, and contemplation, lovingly overlaid with Miyazaki-an sentiments and aesthetics. The through-composed, organic, meandering synthesis heard on Sharing Waves, which was called one of the best ambient albums of 2018 by Fact Magazine, is replaced by meticulous polygonal arrangements that recall the computerized sheen of late 80s Japanese environmental music, using true-to-period gear.
The album hits full stride on "Temporal Dryft," with urgent string swells atop neon polyrhythms that suggest adventure just ahead. "'Temporal Dryft' is the third track from the album. At this point in the story you've found a mysterious artifact with the power to transport your consciousness millions of years back in time - into the body of a tree frog! Not just any tree frog - but a TIME FROG," says Hellfritsch. "When I wrote this I was trying to capture a special inner feeling that happens the moment it's become clear an exciting adventure lays ahead - and there's so much to see and experience so I better keep my senses wide open and stay as present as possible."
Hellfritsch was raised in the wilder parts of
Santa Cruz surrounded by apple orchards before his family relocated to a canyon between redwood-forested mountains. "I was encouraged to spend a lot of time outdoors," says Hellfritsch. "It kept me grounded and instilled a habit of going into and exploring nature as a way of finding inspiration or working through any sort of struggle or problem." The past few years have, of course, bestowed some struggles. The compounding crises of 2020 partly catalyzed Hellfritsch's migration up the Pacific coast to the biome that is the namesake of Cool Maritime. As the region allowed for physical respite, his early interactive-media memories provided a fertile emotional refuge where Big Earth Energy's concept took root. "While writing this album I was somehow back in 1995 - reflecting on when I first played MYST and it totally blew my mind," he recounts. "Something about the idea of working on a game back when our relationships with computers were more simple and magical helped me get out of the modern-computer-life-tech burnout zone I had been in."
"Being in lush ecosystems gives me simultaneous feelings of deep reverence and playful excitement," Hellfritsch says, "and I think they form the foundational tone of a lot of the music I write." As such, his reconnaissance of virtual reality and actual reality feels skillfully balanced as if knowing how to navigate one dimension is merely training for traversing its opposite. On Big Earth Energy, he pinpoints the discovery, escape, introversion, and imagination that are mutual of the two worlds, which he scouts as if they are the same territory.
Pre-order Big Earth Energy
Big Earth
Energy Tracklist:
1.Big Earth Energy
2. Amphibia
3. Temporal Dryft
4. Soft Fascination
5. Avian Glide
6. Secret of the Megafauna
7. Apex
