Marta SmiLga – Lunar Maria, Vol. 1
4.2518 by Ryan Masteller

My almost-seven-year-old son doesn’t play with action figures or anything, he plays with stuffed animals, his favorites being Mario, Luigi, Toad, and Yoshi, because DUH. Also, I think he likes playing with them because he can throw them at other kids in the variation of tag they play at school. So it should be no surprise that his bed and closet are overflowing with random plush creatures and other ephemera. But maybe the coolest ones he has are stuffed globes of Earth, Mars, and the moon (called, yes, a “Hug-a-Moon”), complete with notations of political (on Earth) and geographical locations. He might be the only first grader who wouldn’t uncomprehendingly blink at the mention of Mare Ingenii, Mare Frigoris, Mare Nubium, and Mare Orientale.

How’d you do? Those ring a bell? Don’t tell me my kid is smarter than you, a grown adult! Ah, you shouldn’t feel bad though — I wouldn’t have had a clue either, not until I read that they’re all “dark lunar plains that early astronomers mistook for seas.” And it’s these that Marta SmiLga focuses on throughout her synthesizer song cycle “Lunar Maria, Vol. 1.” A synth-maker and stargazer from Riga, Latvia, Liga Smirnova uses the alias Marta SmiLga (tongue… twisted…) when she wants to get all tripped out on sci-fi and outer-space dream sequences. Every moment on “Lunar Maria, Vol. 1” captures the unearthly awe of early space exploration, when we humans started to figure out there’s a whole heckuva lot out there beyond the confines of Earth. From the Sputnik-y bleeps of “Mare Ingenii” to the interstellar fears conjured by the loneliness of “Mare Frigoris,” Smirnova reports on what she observes in the night sky, each track a deep dive into the everything our imaginations have ever whipped up about the cosmos. And in the end, those lunar plains may as well be space oceans, that’s how deeply immersed we get under Marta SmiLga’s dense spell.

Grab one of the edition of 100 from Crash Symbols. And by the way, the Hug-a-Moon makes for a pretty GREAT projectile, especially if you’ve got the kind of arm my son does. Plus he’s a lefty.