New Album – LLYN Y CWN – Stratigraphy

The man behind Mank also alter-egos himself as Llyn Y Cwn, and he’s back with a brand new album…

‘Stratigraphy’ is an album of environmental ambient sound; three long-form pieces following the voyage of an imagined sonde dropped from the upper atmosphere through the clouds, through the ocean and below the seabed, through the sediments and bedrock, through layers of increasing density and time towards the centre of gravity, through stratigraphy.

An aural cross section of our planet, through air, water and earth, each of these elements a layer of the stratigraphy of Earth, and each with an internal stratigraphy formed over time scales ranging from minutes to millennia.

The album contains the sound of air as its boundary layer traverses geological features, recordings from a hydrophone attached to a CTD (conductivity, temperature and depth probe, an oceanographic instrument used to measure the stratification of the sea) as it descends to 100m below the surface of the Irish Sea. Manipulated samples of a sub bottom profiler, a sonar system that uses acoustic energy to produce images of sub-seabed features.

This music was originally written as part of the ‘Du Y Moroedd’ album, but it was far too long to fit on the CD so an edit appeared instead – this is ‘Stratigraph’y fully realised.

Llyn Y Cwn is a field recording based dark ambient project with focus on atmosphere and environment. Ben Powell has been making electronic music since the late 90s, drawing inspiration from his native North Wales landscape and his participation on research cruises making oceanographic and geophysical measurements. Llyn Y Cwn (Welsh – lake of the dogs) is a small lake at 715m in the Glyder mountain range of Snowdonia, North Wales.  

As well as digital, the album will be released on CD in a limited run of 100 discs, each individually numbered and signed by the artist, in a card digipack featuring photography by the artist