As the name suggests, Martens focuses on a specific sub-region of New Age culture to do with reverence for the cetacean nation: Roger Payne’s whale-song recordings, Joan Ocean’s books about communing with dolphins. He also takes inspiration from the related prog-rock/New Age sub-genre of environmental recordings and “Nature Sounds” tapes. Once again, this zone is only a notch away from avant-garde composers like Annea Lockwood (A Soundmap of the Hudson River, etc) and Pauline Oliveros (whose Deep Listening Band has made music in giant cisterns with 50 second echoes), as well as ex-industrial musician turned sound-recordist Chris Watson (formerly of Cabaret Voltaire). But because New Age’s environmental and bird-song tapes serve a functional purpose–calming the stressed city-dweller with a dose of ersatz pastoral tranquility–it is deemed too lowly to be Art.