Celestial Trails – Observation of Transcendence

Words by Jerry Luke

Observation of Transcendence is the second album by the San Francisco-based ambient music project Celestial Trails, crafted by Fluttery Records founder Taner Torun. Inspired by the vast Pacific Ocean and the serene landscapes that embrace its shores, the album captures the essence of a sunny and calm day by the ocean.

The album weaves together lush synthesizers, drones, and subtle harmonic progressions with field recordings, evoking the serene beauty of nature.

Rapture of Deep Blue was the first track recorded. Torun was meditating by the ocean in Hawaii when a sudden wave of euphoria washed over him—almost as if the ocean itself was singing. Quickly, he turned on a sound recorder to capture the melody, but his true pursuit lay beyond mere sound. He sought that inner voice, longing to weave it into music. For months, he experimented with the human voice, synths, and various instruments, yet nothing could fully replicate the alien-like sound he had envisioned.

“After four months of on-and-off experimentation, I finally got closer to what I wanted. The sound came from an unexpected source: a classical brass instrument, the tuba, processed through 11 digital effects. With that sound, I composed the main structure of Rapture of Deep Blue.”

Along the way, he encountered many failed experiments—but some of those failures led to the creation of fascinating sounds, which were later incorporated into other compositions. “The strange yet calming alien sounds you hear in Ripples in the Current and Peace are the results of these experiments,” he explains.

The compositions combine analog synthesizers with various instruments and employ electroacoustic techniques such as reverb, delay, harmonizing, tape manipulation, and sonic deconstruction to create rich, layered soundscapes.

Field recordings play a crucial role in the album and can be heard prominently in tracks like Pacific in Tender Motion, Aeonian Waves, and Peace. These recordings were made in various locations across California, including Morro Bay, San Francisco / the Bay Area, Santa Cruz, and San Pablo Bay. Another significant source was the Hawaiian Islands, with recordings taken from O‘ahu, Maui, the Island of Hawai’i, and Kauai.

Over the past few years, Torun has immersed himself in Japanese ambient music, drawing inspiration from Kankyo Ongaku, a genre that emerged in the 1980s. Translating to “environment music,” this style was designed to blend seamlessly with its surroundings, creating a calm and unobtrusive atmosphere. The album pays homage to the influential figures of the genre, including Hiroshi Yoshimura, Takashi Kokubo, Haruomi Hosono, and Kenichiro Isoda.

Observation of Transcendence is an invitation to experience calming waves, gentle breezes, and the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean, along with its surrounding ecosystems—through richly textured soundscapes.

Celestial Trails, a solo ambient music project based in San Francisco, was launched by Taner Torun, founder of Fluttery Records.

Born in Turkey to a Turkish father and a mother whose family emigrated from Greece, Torun’s musical journey began in Istanbul, where he played electric guitar in various punk and post-punk bands until 2006. His musical taste began to gravitate more towards ambient, post-rock, neoclassical, and experimentalism around that time. He started the modern classical / experimentalist band A Journey Down The Well in 2007, garnering international recognition within the underground music scene.

In 2008, Taner founded Fluttery Records, an independent label with a focus on nurturing innovative talent across ambient, post-rock, and modern classical genres. The label’s international signing approach was unconventional at the time, surprising many within the music community. Committed to providing a platform for passionate instrumentalists, Fluttery Records became a haven for musicians seeking international acclaim and broader audiences.

Taner emigrated to the United States in the summer of 2018, bringing Fluttery Records with him to San Francisco, where he has resided ever since. “I am one of the many openly LGBTQ individuals who had to leave the country because of the hostile political environment,” says Taner. He was among the 24 people who organized and participated in the first-ever gay pride march in 2003, which attracted more than 100,000 people in 2014 before being banned in 2015.

In the summer of 2023, Taner launched the music project Celestial Trails. The recording for the debut album, Lunar Beachcomber, was completed in January 2024. Released on April 12, 2024, the album received positive reviews, praised for its immersive soundscapes.

Taner frequently travels and during his nature hikes, he engages in field recording, meditation, and note-taking. In addition to helming Fluttery Records, Taner does mastering and album cover design, both for the label’s roster and other artists.

FOR THE DEBUT ALBUM “Lunar Beachcomber”

A Closer Listen: “Waves of Comforting Bliss”
ACL 2024 ~ Spring Music Preview: Ambient & Drone

Taner Torun, the founder of Fluttery Records and the artist known as Celestial Trails, describes the cover image of Lunar Beachcomber as a cross between a “llama, cat, lion, sheep, and dog.” The animal came to him as a dream, and now strolls happily along the imaginary beach. In like manner, the album invites daydreaming, awash in waves of comforting bliss.

White Crate: “Paradise of the Present”

Monday is Earth Day, an annual event celebrated in the name of environmental protection. A new offering to our mother of a speck of sand floating through the vast emptiness of space, Lunar Beachcomber is the debut album by Celestial Trails, an SF-based solo ambient project by Taner Torun. Lush as sweeping ocean views yet gritty as sand between the toes, the album weaves a highly concentrated matrix of sounds and techniques to achieve its sonic sublimity: Close listeners will be able to discern everything from live instruments like piano and guitars to synthesizers to generously applied reverb, delay, and tape manipulated effects. Like existence in this paradise of the present, it is at once overwhelming and yet calming.

Music Musings and Miscellany: Best of the lot, though, is “Lighthouse Behind the Glowing Tree”

Celestial Trails is Taner Torun, founder of San Francisco’s Fluttery Records, an imprint that has been active for sixteen years now. This is the first solo album under the name, and it sits in a guitar-based ambient/drone field not a million miles from the works of Christian Fennesz. The eight tracks range from the brutal noise of “Time Collapse on the Threshing Floor” to the wistful “The Crudest Luminescence”. Highlights include the title track which washes back and forth in a similar way to John Luther Adams’ Becoming Ocean. Best of the lot, though, is “Lighthouse Behind the Glowing Tree” which has the same ghostly feel as Burial at his most elegiac. Considering the set up is pretty basic: ultra-processed guitar, electrostatic noise, amped-up feedback, and ghostly echoes, it’s a varied and worthwhile set.

Echoes and Dust: “The wonders of those two cities.”

Throughout the organic arrangements of his electronic wonders, Taner Torunn, the founder of Fluttery Records, makes his debut with his solo-ambient project, Celestial Trails. This was a big seed for him to go through the layers of nature hikes and city walks, revealing what he envisioned by adding in the sounds of virtual ghost towns that is evidential on his debut album, Lunar Beachcomber.

Anxious Music Magazine: “Feel Like a Traveler of the Sonic Universe”

His fascination with ambient music and the exploration of new musical areas led him to create Celestial Trails, in which a meditative approach immerses the listener in a fascinating, unexpected world. While listening to this album, I feel like a traveler exploring unknown areas of the sonic universe, which is extremely inspiring and relaxing at the same time.

Loop Music Magazine: “Above the Dreamlike Atmospheres”

Torun has taken long hikes through different places in the United States, finding vast spaces with exuberant nature, as well as urban landscapes. He is also passionate about the mysteries that the cosmos holds. In this conjunction, in which the beautiful life of nature and the immense enigma that the cosmos represents, are the sources of inspiration for the composition of “Lunar Beachcomber…” This is how the sea waves recordings are heard. In “Lighthouse Behind the Glowing Tree,” the sound unveils distorted, dirty edges that continue into “Lunar Beachcomber” to finally turn to dust. In “The Crudest Luminescence” the clicks are part of the rough skin that covers this song and another of the delicate nuances that this album offers. The guitar releases its expansive and enveloping melodic line in the final track “Touchdown on Interstellar Shores,” that closes an album that is caressed by its textures and spaciousness that allows us to observe from above the dreamlike atmospheres that Taner Torun creates.

SlaveState: “Forty-one-minute journey brings the mind to rolling waves”

During the eight tracks, it never becomes scattered or disjointed in any way, but Torun steers the ship with a sure hand, regardless of where we are going. For the most part, it’s about fairly massive ambient walls of sound, which are at the same time both too airy to fall under “drone”, and far too noisy and messy to really fall under “ambient”, which makes Celestial Trails stand out somewhat among many nearby acts. Sometimes, for example in the title track and “Lighthouse behind the glowing tree”, we are invited down into almost harshnoise-like abysses, while “Time collapse on the threshing floor” instead begins with homely vinyl crackling, undiluted guitar picking and sacred choirs and “Spell machine manufacturing” almost pulls in the very darkest corners of dubtechno.

Sun13: “Organic Drones”

With a campfire crackle underneath the combination of glacial-like piano textures, analogue synth and bass guitar, Torun creates the kind of organic drones akin to Stars of the Lid. Furthermore, the Celestial Trails experience is tailor-made for those wishing to look outside the kranky remit. There have been so many wonderful outsider labels that have cropped up over the last three years – some new, some operating for years. You can add Fluttery Records and, by extension, Celestial Trails’ Lunar Beachcomber to the list.

INTERVIWES
Music Tribune, Tokyo, Japan

RADIO FEATURES
Star’s End, Hosted by Chuck Van Zyl on WXPN 88.5 Philadelphia, PA
L’Apartament 18 on Radio ALFACS 87.5 FM Spain
Loose Canon on 6 Towns Radio Stoke-on-Trent, Newcastle and Kidsgrove, UK
13 Melek on Açık Radio 95FM Istanbul, Turkey
Noise and Katharsis/Processed Shows on CJSW Radio Calgary, Alberta, Canada

EPK Portal / Fluttery Records

Celestial Trails Portray the Pacific Ocean with Ambient Sound: Observation of Transcendence

The album is an invitation to experience the Pacific’s vast landscapes and ecosystems through textured ambient soundscapes

ABOUT CELESTIAL TRAILS and TANER TORUN

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