Melting Planets by Sivan Cohen Elias with Lauren Siess, Cole Blouin

At once vast and intimate, Melting Planets draws the listener into an immersive soundworld where nature behaves in unexpected ways: drops of rain might sound like a fusion of glassy, metal, wooden, plastic, and electric pops, while gravity shifts in multiple directions, causing bursts of sound to appear, vanish, and continuously descend into the unknown.

The album is the result of two years of musical and extramusical dialogue between three composers/improvisers - Sivan Cohen Elias (sound instruments/ objects, voice, live electronics), Lauren Siess (viola, objects, no-input mixer), and Cole Blouin (electric guitar, objects). Their collaboration culminated in this recording, artistically directed and produced by Sivan Cohen Elias.

The album embraces dynamic, visceral music, conceptualized as musical “scenes” set in fictional worlds undergoing surreal ecological collapse. Within these apocalyptic environments, new hybrid lifeforms begin to emerge. The trio imagined what might survive in an environment defined by constant, extreme transformations - shifting from extreme heat to deep freezes, from dryness to overwhelming humidity. They explored the evolution of a new physics and the struggles for survival that might emerge in such a world. What kinds of creatures would exist? They pictured hybrids of disproportionate, absurd body parts, and speculated on those creatures’ behaviors and interactions. In so doing, the trio discovered the absurdity of this world - its pain, its humor, its complexity, its hope, and its cycles.

On the sonic level, the album presents an intricate, electronic-heavy sound-world that deliberately defies genre classification. The imagery emerged through an ongoing dialogue with their collection of instruments and sound-making devices, which were blended in real-time using digital sound processing. The trio fused elements of classical, multicultural, and electronic instruments with unconventional objects (a complete list is below), while the live electronic manipulations transformed them into immersive, experiential sounds - inviting the listener to perceive the sound itself almost as a physical body, ensuring that the sound had the feeling of melting. One section of the album focuses on a drowning creature - a three-track piece that demands active listening, such that the listener can fully experience the creature’s voice, actions, emotions, and surroundings. It begins with a kazoo and viola mirroring each other in long, bending tones, recalling a desperate cry. Meanwhile, birdlike sounds emerge from electronic manipulations of a bowed fishing line tied around the guitar strings. As the piece unfolds, bubbling water and thick mud are sonically conjured through vibrating devices and a no-input mixer, gradually transforming into a soundscape of melting and drowning. The section culminates in a visceral, choral-like tutti performed on flute piccolo, bowed electric guitar, and viola.

The trio began improvising together in late 2021. In the summer of 2022, just before Siess left for composition studies in Dresden, Germany, and Cohen Elias departed for a teaching position at the University of Minnesota, they decided to record an album. From that session, one track stood out—Scoby Song—the only piece from that recording to make it onto the album. Its name reflects its role as a foundational element, a kind of starter culture for the material they continued to develop remotely over the following year. Throughout discussions, the trio kept returning to ideas of sonic walls, fermentation, unknown cultural sound, and the concept of sound melting. The long, frozen chord at the end of Scoby Song, along with the use of the kazoo and saxophone mouthpiece as tools for personification, became central motifs that evolved further as they worked towards the second recording session.

In the summer of 2023, the trio members reunited in NYC and rehearsed at Studio Fog Expanse, Cole's recording and production space in Ridgewood, Queens, where they continued developing sonic “scenes” by forming a sequence of specified actions and reflected images while improvising the details, nuances, and musical flow. Over two intense days at Greyfade Studio, in Mount Vernon, New York, they recorded multiple takes of those scenes, along with free improvisations working in the same sonic atmospheres, and techniques. This session generated a wealth of material, which Cohen Elias later sorted, selected, and edited. Working with the phenomenal engineer Joseph Branciforte during postproduction – recording, mixing, and mastering – brought the album to life with the exact crispness, clarity, and immersive quality Cohen Elias had envisioned.

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Each member of the trio wrote additional notes on the process of making the record.

Sivan Cohen Elias:

During the long-distance collaborative process toward Melting Planets, I had a special opportunity to develop a new stream of my own personal musical expression as a live electronics creative performer.

We gave each other tasks and recordings to play with. From my end, I thought about how to sonically translate the idea of frozen walls, a world melting, and of an unknown creature crying, turning the sounds into physical bodies.

During those examinations, I also considered what it would take to do the same audio manipulations in real-time. I created computer programming patches that included various delay behaviors, sound synthesis, and granulation tools, which could receive any of the trio's sound sources in real-time.

This gave me a large and flexible sound palette, which corresponded differently to each sound source at every moment. During post-production, the materials kept shaping their metaphors corresponding to world events that occurred during those couple of years (2023-2025).

I am utterly satisfied with the album's result, presenting a unique sound and emotional experience, especially when listening with headphones in a dimly lit room.

Lauren Siess:

The creation of Melting Planets was an exploration of several issues close to my heart — specifically ecological collapse, and how this idea of "collapse" is reflected in our social and political environments.

Exploring this idea through our collective creative lens resulted in a vibrant, dark, poetic, even humorous world. I feel this reflects the complexity of living on a biodiverse planet.

Creating this album invited me to broaden my thinking and palette, while gradually discovering the rich sound world made between us.

Cole Blouin:

Working on Melting Planets changed my creative process. At every stage of the process — from our first rehearsals in early 2022 through to the mastering phase at the end of 2023 — our trio (led by Sivan) kept pushing further and further out into the unknown, never settling for easy answers, taking very few assumptions about 'musicality' for granted.

Working from images, prompts, processes, concepts for structured improvisation, and more, beautiful sounds and sound-logics would emerge, be considered in terms of what they might uncover, and then — often quite unsentimentally — become material for further exploration (in the form of yet more images, prompts, processes, etc).

I feel that the end result expresses newness, discovery, playfulness, and rigor, constantly. On every level, our working process allowed us to create something we couldn't have begun to properly imagine beforehand.

In my own personal music-making since our 2023 recording session, I've found myself working with a much broader palette of sounds, focusing on pushing further and further out into the unknown, trusting my intuition, with a renewed awareness that the best possible future is one we can't quite see yet.

Sivan Cohen-Elias, Lauren Siess, and Cole Blouin met in New York in late 2021. After six months of rehearsal as an improvised music trio, their attention shifted to album-oriented work. As of May 2025, their record Melting Planets is out on Minnesota-based Innova Recordings.