Obsidian Scaffolds from Thermoraft by Terraphonic

A crystalline hum settles in, then the grinding starts. This track plunges into the precarious engineering of Vokanu’s aerial cities, a sonic blueprint of how ancient mineral heart might fuse with the relentless upward thrust of new urban spaces. There’s a distinct storyline here: the struggle for stability within a framework built on contradiction, where the deep thrum of geothermal conduits meets the impossible hum of steel lattice work. We spent countless late nights in the studio chasing that precise resonance, attempting to make the prepared kalimbas, processed through granular synthesis, sound like the very breath of a city, while bowed saw blades echoed the stress fractures in floating glass structures. It was a tedious process, getting the crystallized metal strings to hold pitches for minutes against the chaotic overtones of hollow volcanic glass percussion, which always felt like whale song battling Tibetan throat singing. This piece pushes those boundaries, the sharp dynamic shifts mirroring the constant thermal currents that keep these metropolises aloft. It’s about finding a strange, almost unsettling beauty in the collision, where the precise, unyielding structures somehow yield to delicate, ancient frequencies, or perhaps, contain them. The goal was to render not just sound, but the *feeling* of living within something so impossibly grand, yet so inherently fragile, a testament to adaptation.

We create soundscapes using volcanic glass percussion, singing obsidian, and thermal field recordings from seven floating islands. Each track maps geological phenomena into meditative compositions that blur the lines between ancient ritual and modern ambient exploration.