Flounder Maps

(2025)

Terror, ecstasy, and even comfort. Mark lJzerman summons an unmistakably modern gamut of emotions with the thrillingly cinematic Flounder Maps.

Perspective is key: the album oscillates between panoramic, desolate synths and beautiful, twinkling microworlds, each angle complicating a work that functions as a portrait of near-future worlds. There is a palpable precarity to these speculative soundscapes reflected in the title — "flounder," i.e. to navigate difficult situations. Rushes of digital euphoria collapse into cataclysmic noise, suggesting eternal biological cycles: life, death, growth, decay, and the constant transfer of energy.
Occupying a parallel zone to Jeff VanderMeer's distorted eco-fiction, Flounder Maps opens with "All Of Moss Holding All Of Her": warm, primordial synths swirl alongside a buoyant bassline, as if soundtracking a chill-out room in the depths of a sentient forest. Next is "Kinship Of Clover": hypnotic electronic tones seem to chirrup like mechanical birds while breathy human vocals rise blissfully in the background — a hypnotic synthesis of nature and technology.
There is a keen psychogeographic aspect to the dense collages of Flounder Maps, as if lJzerman, who also creates media installations focusing on ecology, is guiding us through a vividly rendered world, hyperreal like a video game. First we wander, taking in the bucolic scene. Then, when the kick drum screams into life on "First Flounder," we run — in fear. But this isn't a work of dystopia, nor utopia, but of mutation and change, ideas which are audible in each heavily processed sound. It feels fitting that the album should end with "Leer Van De Laatste Dingen," or "learn from the last things" in English. The track's title implies growth, conversation, and openness: out of its bed of bittersweet, gauzy electronics, a melody blooms forth.

(Lewis Gordon)