Throughout the organic arrangements of his electronic wonders, Taner Tourn, the founder of Fluttery Records, makes his debut with his solo-ambient project, Celestial Trails. This was a big seed for him to go through the layers of nature hikes and city walks, revealing what he envisioned by adding in the sounds of virtual ghost towns that is evidential on his debut album, Lunar Beachcomber.
When you hear a title like that, it just hits you. The album title, it almost sounds like either Klaus Schulze, Tangerine Dream or Ash Ra Tempel could’ve collaborated during their Ohr years in the early ‘70s. Recorded between June 2023 to January of this year from Pittsburgh to San Francisco, the album itself captures the wonders of those two cities.
Lunar Beachcomber can be unsettling at times. For Taner, he wanted to make the music more of an atmospheric door opening up to whole new universe, revealing what will happen in the years to come. The sounds of a record crackling on ‘The Crudest Luminescence’ and a ‘Time Collapse on the Threshing Floor’ give us an insight of an abandoned city that’s been frozen in time since the 1950s, and the sound of the same music you would hear in the malls, playing 24/7.
It has some spooky elements between electric guitars, church organ-like textures which speak of a Farfisa organ, and sending a message to a visitor letting them know that all hope is lost. That and ‘Spell Machine Manufacturer’ reveals an alarming filter creeping up behind you.
The composition itself makes it a disturbing sequence of all of the noises that Taner unveils to the listener, anxious to see what happens before fading off into the night while the opening track ‘A Pair of New Wings’ begins to send-off into a meditated guide of a calming situation.
Meanwhile, ‘Touchdown on Interstellar Shores’ lands listeners on a different planet after Earth which has now become an unsettling place to raise a family. There’s a sense of hope, a sense of bringing everything to an optimistic approach where everything will be different. But what will happen next in their second chapter? That’s up to them to decide.
