Mark Tamea Artist Page

'Tessellation' - Album text from Tamea.org

In early 2008 I was invited by Ressonus Records to contribute an exclusive track to their compilation CD Ressonus Net Vol.1 - and so I produced a piece called 'The Orgeo Crux'. It was based upon an experience from the previous summer that took place during a field recording trip in the Belgium Ardenne.

As I sat silently motionless in a mountain forest at 4:00am attempting to capture a dawn chorus of insects and birds, a young deer unexpectedly appeared and passed close by, seemingly undisturbed by my presence. As the animal moved through my field of vision the medium of the forest suddenly changed, becoming intrinsically heightened. My breath held still as the sounds of the forest birds became sparse and the emerging sunlight seemed to freeze the air between the pines. It was as if this animal left in its wake a trail cut from another space which had temporarily merged with my own. After a short while the deer disappeared back into the foliage, along with its mystery. The birds became momentarily frantic as if they were attempting to warn me off from following.

Some time after completing the track and sending it off to Ressonus I started to think that the themes outlined within 'The Orgeo Crux' had the potential to be expanded and worked up into a whole album. I began to consider how alternate realities could be connected to individual objects or animals, encoded within a deeper level of nature ordinarily out of range of the human senses, unless uncovered by magickal, covert or accidental means.

Ingrained ambience was important for the project and Tessellation thus contains audio information gleaned from some powerful environments. I concentrated particularly on procuring sounds and samples on original landscapes, as well as from several buildings washed in centuries of dedicated adoration. Amongst others, recordings were made in the aforementioned forests of the Ardenne, the Palais des Papes in Avignon, the glacial caves of Mount Blanc, and around the shoreline of the Lac de St. Croix, under whose waters lay the remains of a sunken village, Ste-Croix-de-Verdon. These were then interleaved with a second layer of recordings collected from daily experiences, and used as a basis to interpret the hidden lucidity I was searching for. Further emotional direction was emphasized with minimal orchestration and electro-acoustic elements.

It is my intention that the listener begins an excursion drifting slowly further out of phase with baseline awareness, and that some of the morphic resonance collected from these locations makes it into their psychic construction kit. The album is divided into five parts for convenience, but is designed to be regarded as one piece.