In his latest release, Archipelago of Shadows, Belgian composer Lieven Martens presents a work of profound gravity. The album, a five-track suite of field recordings and electronics, is directly shaped by his experience as a humanitarian aid worker in eastern Congo. As Martens himself explains, he spent time in Bukavu and its surrounding villages, a region ravaged by a brutal and complex conflict: “I conducted interviews, supported Congolese colleagues, and oversaw a documentary about survivors of sexual violence – girls and women deliberately targeted amid an ongoing and brutal conflict.”
This firsthand experience forms the album’s essential core. The “modern program music” Martens creates is not an abstract exploration but a direct translation of what he “saw, heard, and felt.” The album’s narrative arc, described in its accompanying text, begins with “fragile beauty… winged creatures circling bioluminescent groves.” These are the pure, immersive field recordings from his long nights at Lake Kivu, capturing a world of inherent harmony. This tranquillity is violently disrupted by the arrival of “outsiders” for “luminous ore.” This isn’t a metaphor; it’s the sonic embodiment of the armed militias on motorcycles and the mineral trucks Martens witnessed passing by, leaving “only silence and fear in the village.”
The conflict, as Martens stresses, is a “battle of narratives” fueled by Western indifference and economic interests. He points directly to corporations1 whose supply chains he says are linked to minerals violently extracted from Congolese soil and smuggled across Lake Kivu. The album critiques this “outer hegemony,” the journalists and experts whose analyses often perpetuate the colonial narratives that justify inaction. This culminates in the stark refrain: “lives are deemed expendable… nobody gives a damn.”
Cobalt, copper, gold. The riches in the mines of eastern Congo contrast sharply with the violent conflict above ground. A conflict that particularly affects the most vulnerable: girls and women. They are too often a target in the struggle for resources, with Sexual violence used as a weapon of war.
From the website ‘Mamas for Africa’ (https://mamasforafrica.be/en/), the organisation Lieven was working for.
Crucially, Martens is deeply critical of his own position, describing himself as “that walking cliché of the pathetic white savior.” This self-awareness ensures the album avoids appropriation. Instead, it serves as an act of witness. By releasing the album for free, he refuses to turn the “horrors of the battleground” into a transaction. Archipelago of Shadows is an invitation. It is a call not to “dig for minerals, but to mine bricks to turn the conversation around.” While it unflinchingly documents a landscape of sorrow, it ultimately finds its focus in the resilience of the Congolese people, whose lives persist “under the sword of violence and exploitation,” a fragile, enduring beauty in the deepest of shadows.
Archipelago of Shadows (October 11th, 2025) Edições CN
Minerals such as Cobalt are still extracted by thousands of children in the Congo for the manufacture of electronic components in mobile phones, computers and other electronic devices. In 2018, The Guardian said in one report: “Cobalt is not awash in cerulean hues. Instead, it is smeared in misery and blood.” Yet still this practice continues.
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Read Lieven’s Substack: