BLOCK, OLIVIA - Innocent Passage in the Territorial Sea

"With Innocent Passage in the Territorial Sea, Olivia Block charts out a deepening current of work that condenses her longer form approaches into a series of richly fluid vignettes. Each piece is led by a bass pattern, the same seven notes, which reappear throughout the album in different configurations. The tonal repetition creates an overall sense of reduction and amplification; an extreme realization of focus. Tracing waves of warped Mellotron melodies and harmonies, the album celebrates an unfolding of the acoustic horizon, and dwells in a perpetual release of revealed frequencies and pulsing of waves which merge together to unite, and then divide, in time. Easily her most articulate and considered work to date, Innocent Passage in the Territorial Sea reads as the first chapter in a new book of sound to come. From Olivia: "During the lockdown, unable to do anything in the world, I turned inward and adopted a regular practice of listening with intention, while on psychedelic mushrooms. The mushrooms helped me to listen somatically, pulling my ears towards low tonal patterns and the warped sounds of a broken Mellotron. I started playing in my studio, creating bass-driven pieces on my vintage Korg synth organ, using a very limited tonal palette. The pandemic seemed like a strange dream or a surrealistic science fiction story. I re-read the brilliant surrealistic science fiction novel, Ice, by Anna Kavan, which describes a frozen post-apocalypse. Mentally, I connected Kavan's ice-world with the isolation of the lockdown. I approached this album as the soundtrack to this speculative science fiction film. It's an attempt to translate my emotions about this surreal and strange historical moment into sound." - Room40 .