Mazen Kerbaj & Sharif Sehnaoui / Erdem Helvacioğlu & Ulrich Mertin

In the meantime, Sharif Sehnaoui coaxes unusual sounds from his guitar: it transforms into his percussive instrument. Sometimes energetic, sometimes gentle, he pounds on its corpus with his sticks. Audible are heavy sounds and rhythms that draw circles and then become thin and tamed again. Between these and the sequences of Kerbaj’s drawings emerge unintended, coincidental points of interference that provide the impetus for an open and free colour-sound voyage.

As any filmmaker knows, one of the most powerful aspects of music is its ability to construct emotional arcs and guide narrative by purely sonic means. Simultaneously ethereal and concrete, both spectral and textural, “Planet X”–the debut collaboration between guitarist Erdem Helvacioğlu and violist Ulrich Mertin – tells the story of the appearance in the sky of a new heavenly body and follows one hapless explorer’s quest to discover what lies at its heart. Over the course of two years, Helvacioğlu and Mertin composed and crafted this project, building up layers of jagged scratching sounds, plaintive melodies, percussive hits, and dark drones. The two artists grounded the sound of the album in strings but also employed unorthodox recording techniques, sophisticated processing algorithms, and multi-tracking to achieve a rich, complex, resonant texture. Throughout, the sound is unmistakably forward-looking, evocative of the project’s science fiction themes and redolent of the eerie, sometimes dark feel of sci-fi films like “Alien”, “Moon”, and “2001”.