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From 1969 to 1979, a series of field recordings appeared on the Atlantic label under the title Environments<\/em>. Song titles included \u201cThe Psychologically Ultimate Seashore\u201d and \u201cDawn in New Hope, Pennsylvania\u201d (which would have made a dynamite title for a Ween album), presenting painstakingly recorded sonic representations of places and the sound-worlds they produce. The marketing capitalized on the hippie counterculture, stressing both the transportive and relaxing properties of the sounds. \u201cBetter than booze, safer than pot,\u201d as a quote from Life<\/em> magazine put it. Son Lux guitarist Rafiq Bhatia titled his new album Environments<\/em> (September 12), and filled it with song titles that could come from its namesake: \u201cAviary I | Sunrise,\u201d \u201cRain on the Canopy | Melting Sky,\u201d \u201cClearing, Crickets.\u201d But unlike their ancestors, these tracks aren\u2019t designed to soothe, and there\u2019s nothing natural about them.<\/p>\n The album begins, after a spate of faint feedback that gradually coheres into mournful consonance, with the chirp and chatter of birds. But \u201cAviary I | Sunrise\u201d doesn\u2019t contain any samples\u2014the whistles and calls emanate from Bhatia\u2019s guitar, aided by pedals and processing. Throughout the album, Bhatia maintains a porous tension between textural noise and lambent melody, his guitar sliding between pitch-shifted scrapes, floating, fragmentary phrases, foghorn drones, and fractal glimmers. Drummer Ian Chang, a Son Lux bandmate, usually helps with the noise, deploying rhythms that mimic the unpredictable impacts and sudden shifts of seismic events and meteorological distress. Chang helps keep the eerie, rumbling \u201cVolcano \u2206,\u201d at a boil (it never explodes), while his gigantic synthetic concussions give \u201cThe Sky Breaks Open\u201d an apocalyptic swing. Trumpeter Riley Mulherkar often helps with the melody, his bruised, tallowy tone adding an acrid sweetness to tracks like the elegiac \u201cClearing, Crickets.\u201d (It\u2019s a sure bet that the insectile susurration that lends the track a nocturnal feel comes from Bhatia\u2019s guitar, not from nature.)<\/p>\n More from Spin:<\/p>\n Though every track on Environments<\/em> has the open-ended flow of almost complete improvisation (the 11-minute \u201cAviary I | Sunrise\u201d was captured in one take), Bhatia has clearly put his sound design knowledge to good use (Son Lux received an Oscar nod for their score for Everything Everywhere All at Once<\/em>), giving his work a self-contained logic that belies its spontaneous origins. \u201cRain on the Canopy | Melting Sky\u201d segues from brittle droplets to squeaky flitter to starlit reverb as seamlessly as night sinking into the horizon. Bhatia\u2019s palette can approach the cosmic\u2014the drone shower and molten tones at the end of \u201cMelting Sky\u201d suggests exactly such a sidereal phenomenon. But he might pay more attention to the little things, like the way his closely picked high strings evoke the play of light on (or in) a fluid surface in \u201cGlimmers in the Ocean Deep,\u201d or the evolution of the rushing dissonance and conch-shell moans that open \u201cAt Midnight on a Black Sand Beach, the Raging Tides Begin to Speak.\u201d Environments<\/em> is a work of both big physical forces and minute cellular interactions.The original Environments<\/em> promised to create an oasis of nature within the modern home. Bhatia\u2019s Environments<\/em> conjures its own worlds and fills them with artificial beauty, before polluting them, breaking them down, and building them back up. If Bhatia\u2019s sound worlds are simulacra, they tell us something about the real world we\u2019re working so hard to replace.<\/p>\n