Imagine the first hour of a sky that has not yet decided what color to be. That’s the world that opens when The Resonant Field, the album from Vivid Stars Forgotten on EC Underground, begins. Long pads unfurl from somewhere beneath the floor of hearing, soft‑edged and slow‑breathing, each chord opening like a night‑blooming flower whose petals loosen one by one in the dark. The synthesizers glow with the warmth of old analog circuitry — amber, honeyed — yet the spaciousness belongs entirely to the present. They remember the singing bowls and temple bells of 1980s New Age, carrying that lineage into cleaner, wider air where every sustained note has room to bloom, turn, and dissolve.
Over this bed, small lights appear. A single bell tone is struck and left to fade for what feels like a full minute, its overtones drifting apart and shimmering in the reverb like heat rising from still water, like breath on cold glass, like the last ring of a gong in an empty hall at dawn.
Pentatonic phrases wander in and out of arrangements and dissolve — a footprint pressed into wet sand and washed away. Field recordings hover at the edges. They ask for no attention and give only company, the way an old friend sits beside you in silence until the silence becomes the conversation.
Vivid Stars Forgotten gives rhythm to breath alone. A pulse swells and recedes at the pace of a slow inhale. Filters open by degrees so gradual that brightness arrives unnoticed, a lantern turned up one hair’s width at a time, and only afterward do you realize the whole room has been bathed in gold. Time loosens its grip. Minutes pool and stretch, time taking on a different meaning when bathed in these electronic meditative hymns.
The harmonic language stays tender and unhurried, lingering on suspended chords that refuse to resolve and are all the more peaceful for it, each one an open door that never needs to be walked through. Deep sub tones hum at the bottom of the mix like the earth’s own resting heartbeat, a warmth felt in the ribs and the soles of the feet.
Above them, crystalline harmonics shimmer like stardust spilled across a dark ceiling, each grain catching its own light. Between these poles, voices without words rise and fall — soft choral textures built from synthesis and breath, like distant monks at evening prayer, like a congregation of wind chimes, like the sound a mountain might make if it learned to sing quietly to itself.
Reverb spreads through the mix until the room feels subtly larger, the sound widening in a way you notice first in your own posture. The music settles into a broad, steady openness, something you inhabit, a space held together by tone and patience. In that quiet expansion, the album’s title becomes literal: the field is the room itself, gently activated until air, walls, and body share the same low, steady vibration. Inside the long fade of the final chord, the mind stops tracking its small tasks and simply rests, as if the music had cleared a bit of space and invited you to stay there.
The Resonant Field is music for threshold hours — dawn practice, dusk reflection, the quiet minutes before sleep, the held breath between one thought and the next. Released through EC Underground, it asks nothing, explains nothing, and leaves the listener unhurried and unburdened, as if the day’s noise had been rinsed away in clear water and only stillness remained: luminous, wide, and entirely your own.
Written by Jonathan Bishop. Jonathan is a writer, and the Editor and Founder of ChoonReview. His engagement with electronic music began in the late 1980s through early industrial acts such as Skinny Puppy, Coil and Ministry, and that interest soon spread into other styles such as Plunderphonics (John Oswald, Negativland, Stock, Hausen & Walkman et al). When IDM exploded onto the scene in the early 1990s, he became utterly immersed in it and that devotion has stayed with him ever since. Today Jonathan works as an engineer and sound designer, with Bitwig Studio as his primary creation platform. The hands-on knowledge of sound design and production that comes with that work shapes how he listens to and writes about the releases that reach ChoonReview.
The Resonant Field by Vivid Stars Forgotten releases October 23 2020 on EC Underground
