Arthur King - Changing Landscapes (Mina Las Pintadas) - Vinyl LP

The latest installment of the "Changing Landscapes” series - Arthur King goes deep into a Chilean copper mine to explore a deeply sonorous, beguilingly heavy percussive experimental electronic and decidedly heady cosmic music. 

Arthur King is one of the many experimental endeavors coming out of multimedia artist Peter Walker's AK Studio. Walker assembles different combinations of artists - whether musicians, designers, filmmakers, or sculptors - to collaborate with on various projects. The work, overall, encompasses experiments in film, records, installations, sculpture, photography, and even virtual reality. One of the studio's primary processes, which has resulted in the Changing Landscapes series, is for Walker and collaborators to set up camp in a particular locale, observing and collecting sounds and ideas to be reprocessed through creative reinterpretations of those locales - whether the Scottish Isle of Eigg, an Iowa farm, or a copper mine in Chile.

In the case of that Chilean mine, the resulting recording is Changing Landscapes (Mina Las Pintadas), an enthralling record of pulsing and psychologically exploratory songscapes. Deep grooves tunnel through tones and sonic textures, following subterranean and psychic pathways, alternately narrowing and widening while heavily processed flute treads over aesthetic stepping stones like Jon Hassell and Holger Czukay. The rhythms of "Terra Amarilla" and "La Farola" wouldn't be out of place on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. And the overall timbre, the organic-as-synthesized nature will find welcome home in the hearts of anyone who loves these artists.