11 September 2026 the independent label Emika Records presented the project Fountain Immersive. The album's release is scheduled for 30 October 2026.
This is a spatial continuation of the album Fountain, released in March. But Emika emphasizes: this is not an ordinary remix to which surround sound was added after the work was finished.
Every sound of the new work was originally composed, recorded and placed within a multidimensional acoustic space — for Dolby Atmos, Spatial Audio and planetary domes.
In an ordinary stereo recording, music comes mainly from two directions — left and right. An immersive system makes it possible to distribute sound objects around the listener, including above them. A voice can approach from one side, a piano can unfold in front, a choir can rise upward, and an electronic texture can slowly pass through the entire space.
The composition acquires not only duration and pitch, but also its own architecture.
A studio among the trees
To create the album, Emika and her team converted her studio in Rottweil, near the German Black Forest, into an immersive space of the format 7.1.4.
This configuration includes seven main channels around the listener, one low-frequency channel and four overhead speakers. It makes it possible not only to surround a person with sound horizontally, but also to build it vertically.
The studio came about thanks to a crowdfunding campaign How To Make Music Immersive. It was supported by 293 peoplewho together 24 843 euros. Genelec and Dolby Laboratories also joined the project.
Thus the space for creating music itself became a collective work: many people helped a place come into being in which sound could acquire new directions of movement.
And yet technology is not the main hero here. It serves what arose before any equipment — the author's personal experience.
Turning pain into beauty
Fountain was born after the passing of Emika's mother — an artist who from childhood taught her daughter to turn pain into beauty.
The image of the fountain became the basis not only of the lyrics, but also of the project's musical composition. Water rises from a single source, breaks into countless droplets, reflects light and returns. It preserves its nature no matter how many forms it takes.
In creating the visual world, Emika turns to the same processes: reflection, refraction, diffraction and scattering of light. Music and image follow a single principle — one impulse unfolds into a multitude of directions.
Personal feeling does not disappear here inside the technology. On the contrary, space helps it become audible from all sides.
Voice, electronics and sacred choir
Emika wrote the music and lyrics herself, performed the vocal and piano parts and created the album's sound design.
The electronic sound was complemented by a string orchestra and choir, recorded at the Czech Television studio in Prague. Taking part in the work were Prague Metropolitan Orchestra and the choir Vox Pragae under the baton of conductor Miriam Nemcova.
The arrangements for two compositions were created by the Catalan composer Bernat Vivancos — one of the notable contemporary authors of sacred and choral music. His task was to embody in sound the idea of ascent.
Thus inside Fountain Immersive several musical languages meet:
- the human voice;
- piano;
- analog synthesizers;
- deep electronics;
- string orchestra;
- polyphonic choir;
- spatial sound design.
They do not overlay one another as separate layers. Each receives its own place and direction within the shared architecture.
This is polyphony in which differences do not hinder wholeness but create it.
Can Dolby Atmos be heard in headphones?
The full sound of the 7.1.4 system unfolds in a specially equipped studio, cinema, or home space with appropriate acoustics.
However, the album will also be available in Dolby Atmos and Spatial Audio for compatible mobile devices and headphones. The digital edition will include MP4 audio files that can be played through equipment supporting spatial sound.
Of course, headphones do not turn into twelve physical loudspeakers. They create a virtual spatial scene through digital processing. Therefore, the impression will depend on the device, the software, and the listener's individual perception.
The first public listening sessions will take place:
- 26 October — in London;
- 27 October — in Berlin;
- 28 October — in Munich;
- 6 November — in Rottweil.
And 22 January 2027 year in Bochum, a series of performances in planetariums will begin. Then the project will travel to Münster, Hamburg, Lucerne, Stuttgart, Berlin, Prague and Jena. In the planetarium version, spatial sound will merge with images by the Hungarian artist László Zsolt Bordos, projected onto the dome. Independent Record Label
When the listener becomes part of the work
An ordinary concert stage draws a noticeable boundary: the performer is here, the listener there.
Immersive music makes this boundary less obvious. A sound event can arise not only in front, but also beside, behind or above the head. A person no longer looks at the work from a single point — he finds himself inside its movement.
However, this does not mean that technology automatically creates deeper music. The spatial format can amplify an artistic intention only when the direction of sound becomes part of the composition itself, and not an external effect.
In Fountain Immersive space is conceived as a musical parameter from the very beginning. It does not embellish finished songs — it participates in their birth.
What did this event add to the sound of the planet?
The water of a fountain seems like a multitude of separate drops, but each of them remains a continuation of a single source.
So too can music unfold through voice, choir, strings, electronics and movement in space — not dividing into separate entities, but revealing different facets of a single impulse.
And the person here is not separate from the sound. At the moment of listening, sound passes through his body, meets his memory and feelings, acquiring an experience that did not exist before this encounter.
Perhaps immersive sound reminds us of what music has always been: not an object before a person, but a living movement in which space, vibration and consciousness recognize themselves as a single whole.
