'Noumena' is the new album from UK-based musician, Sonaura. Developed from experiments with tape loops, synths and field recordings, the album deals with the complex theme of objective reality and mental health.
Sonaura utilises the textures of worn out cassettes to present a beautiful, dreamy, nostalgic, yet slightly unhinged and unreliable narrative of events throughout the album.
Sonaura shares the following thoughts on his creation of Noumena:
Fight or flight mode is a crazy thing. Time is a punch, a smudge across the sky. Everything is now, hyper real. Our senses, everything. 100%. A million thoughts rush through our minds and maybe just a millisecond ticks over out there in the real world. We can do incredible things. Whip ourselves or others away from danger with superhuman speed. Like flies evading swatting hands in slow motion. We're in a rush, dress slowly.
A slew of recent fight or flight moments forced me to question not only my own memory but my perception of things which led me down a strange path around objective reality; it’s a fun concept but if you get too deep it’s ultimately as isolating as solipsism. Everything we experience is our unique version of events and that can be as wonderful as it is frightening. I think I’m gonna leave it at that.
I came back to this album 3 times. The first version was dark and sickening and just felt wrong. Not something I wanted to share with the world, but I knew there was something here worth working on. Something I needed to process. The second version still waded through the darkness, the confusion of it. But this, the third version… This time it finally digested, fruiting a collection from the other side which I’m happy to share with you.
I hope you enjoy it. x
- Sonaura
Credits
All pieces written and produced by Greg Webster
Artwork by Elise Wilson
Layout by Timothy Allen
© 2023 Sonaura
REVIEWS
UK-based artist Sonaura follows up a cassette on giraffe tapes with Noumena for Tasmania's Perceptual Tapes label. Themes of mental health and objective reality are sensitively explored through ambient/drone layers of tape loops, synths and field recordings. Sonaura taps into the texture and fidelity of worn-out tapes to give a dreamy almost sepia-tinged sound. It would seem the creation of these pieces was a cathartic process - this is the third version of the album after previous versions were deemed too dark to share, refining the sound until it reached glimmers of light.
Anthony Locke