Discovery Zone

Night Sky marbled vinyò edition. 350 copies. Discovery Zone is the project of JJ Weihl, the New York-born, Berlin-based musician and former member of Fenster. In 2023 she was commissioned to perform inside the dome of the historic Zeiss-Groß Planetarium, and rather than carry over her usual rhythm-led sound she rebuilt the project from the circuitry up, composing in Ambisonics, a directional form of spatial audio, played back across a mosaic of forty-nine speakers.

Written for live performance, the work was never conceived as an album so much as a three-dimensional event, sound arriving from every direction. For this release Weihl reworked it from the ground up for stereo with her long-time producer E/T and co-writer Lucas Chantre, her Fenster bandmate, the pieces spiralling and expanding outward in nested layers of synth and bass.

Its theme is a "circular library", a network said to hold everything that ever was or will be, and a creation myth for a simulated universe that still leaves room for the natural world. An audio rendering of the Big Bang is run through a vocoder, a universe born in a dial-up tone; environmental recordings are woven into the electronic field; the music moves between the posthuman and something close to the devotional.

Drawing on writers from Jorge Luis Borges and Johannes Kepler to James Gleick, and written alongside her album Quantum Web, it is issued by RVNG Intl. on vinyl.