Kooragang Island Frogs

This recording was made at night alongside a freshwater pond on Kooragang Island near Newcastle, NSW. Kooragang Island is a unique location because it was once an extensive estuarine wetland dominated by mangroves and saltmarsh. However, much of the land was reclaimed for agriculture and a network of roads and pathways were constructed across the site. As a result, a series of swales were created that, despite being amongst estuarine environments, retain mostly freshwater habitats. These habitats are highly dependent on seasonal rainfall but they provide locally important breeding habitats for threatened species such as teh Green and Golden Bell Frog. In this recording, you can hear two dominant species, Litoria peronii and Litoria fallax. These two "tree frog" species are relatively common in the local area.

Abandoned Drains

Over the past decade, Hexham Swamp on the NSW coast new Newcastle has been the subject of one of the largest wetland rehabilitation projects in the southern hemisphere. Part of the project has been the reintroduction of tidal flows to the wetland and as part of that process, an old pipelines that once acted as drains have been decomissioned. The old pipes had been discarded onsite and these recordings were made on an extremely windy day from a shaltered space inside the pipes.

Abandoned Drains by seaworthy

Two Lakes & 12k December Sale

Seaworthy and Matt Rosner's 2010 collaboration "Two Lakes" met with great critical aclaim on its release and we're happy to let you all known that during the month of December, you can pick it up for a bargain price during 12k's annual December sale. Alongside our CD, you can also grab a few other great releases from 12k includingreleases from Ken Kirschner, Fourcolor, Stephan Mathieu (highly recommended!), Moss and Murralin Lane. Full details of the sale , as well as sound samples, are available on the 12k website.

Singing Floodlights

This recording was made with contact mics on floodlight towers at Campbell Park, Russell Lea, NSW, Australia. The towers are relatively narrow and at over 30m high with their large banks of floodlights tend to sway a little once the wind picks up. These recordings were made during a period of particularly strong winds, a common occurance in Sydney during September/October each year. The sounds in these recordings are primarily made from the movement of internal wires/cables as the huge structures sway in the wind. During these recordings, the movement in the lights above was quite dramatic.

Singing Floodlights by seaworthy

Broken Estuary

In Aprill 2011, I was working on the far north coast of NSW. After considerable rainfall, many of the local estuaries that had been cut off from the ocean by an accumulation of sand now spilled across the beach as tannin stained water flowed to the sea. The overflows cut into the beach, creating new creeklike connections. The sounds here are of the fast flowing water across the beach and between debris, chunks of sand falling from the creek's edges into the water and distinct thunder as a new storm front approaches.

Broken Estuary by seaworthy

Minyon Falls, Nightcap National Park

Nightcap National Park contains extensive areas of lush Gondwana Rainforests and was preserved by a determined group of conservationists in the 1980s. These photos and recordings were made during a brief visit in April 2011 to Minyon Falls. The sound composition here contains a series of recordings made surrounding the creekline leading to the falls themslves. Surrounded by dense forest, there are bird calls (as well as an occasional frog croak) but dominating the recordings are the sounds of the falls themselves that create a background drone running through most of the piece.

Minyon Falls, Nightcap National Park by seaworthy

Gutters filled with sand

Hydrophone in gutters and sand by seaworthy

Myalup Recordings (part 2)

Myalup Sand Dunes by seaworthy

More than just the animals

It wasn't all birds, frogs, wind and water while we were recording Two Lakes. A series of recordings were made in this lakeside house including electric and acoustic guitars, ukulele and a couple of other bits and pieces. These couple of tracks from the album feature the more traditional instrumentation alongside field recordings. There was considerable experimentation with the instrumentation during the time were were on the south coast. There are a lot of recordings that didn't end up making it onto the final version of the record. One of the interesting things we played around with was playing loops of acoustic instruments through the two amps were took down, a Fender Deluxe and a small "non-name" mini valve amp with broken speaker. The contrast between the bright acoustic instruments and the weathered, fractured and distorted mini amp provided some nice textured that weren't dissimilar to some fo the field recordings distorted by sudden bursts of wind. As well as some direct recordings into the computer, some room recordings in a few different nooks and crannies were made with the zoom and later downloaded to computer. These provided some nice ambience and room sound to the recordings.

Meroo Stream by seaworthy
Meroo Lake Pt 1 by seaworthy

Waves in Caves

I (cam) had the great pleasure to meet sound artist (and fellow 12k kid) Stephen Vitiello on his recent visit to Sydney as part of the amazing Sound of Red Earth project (Kaldor Public Art Project). Stephen has kindly included one of our pieces recorded as part of the Two Lakes sessions in his recent podcast for Symiosis. This recording, titled Waves in Cave, was recorded on one of the rock shelves adjacent to Merro Lake. There were a few large overhanging sandstone outcrops along the shore, a couple with gutters in the rockshelf allowing waves to wash up over the rock. A series of recordings were done using a shotgun mic, facing into one of these "caves" to record the echo and bounce of the crashing waves sound.

Listen to Stephen Vitiello's Symbiosis podcast.

Symbiosis 69 - Seaworthy & Matt Rosner

The wonderful Symbiosis has just posted their latest podcast featuring Seaworthy and Matt Rosner.
Much credit goes to Matt for putting this mix together as he describes the material contained within " This mix for Symbiosis is made up of a live set recorded last year at Sydney’s Serial Space. The recording documents the first time we had collaborated. The take is completely improvised with no rehearsal beforehand, it was just a case of arrive at the venue and play. At the end of the live set, the mix features a short re-working of material from the Two Lakes sessions. Processed ebowed guitar recorded are set against a recording taken in a dense area of sedges surrounding Lake Meroo."

Listen at Symbiosis

Rocks

There are some amazing rock formations along the coast around Meroo National Park where the recordings for Two Lakes took place. Some of the most interesting were the piles of rocks on top of and adjacent to the rock platforms. A large jumble of misshapen rocks and boulders that have no doubt been rearranged time and time again by the strong southerly storm swells that so often march up, and pound into, the coast within this region.

Bushfire Trail

Parts of the national park surrounding the Meroo and Termeil lake systems were badly burnt following a wildlife the previous summer. Throughout the part, some of the firetrails had been closed and signs in place warned for falling branches. The blackened trunks were in stark difference to the bright green new growth, both of leaves and grass below. During our visit there were some strong winds whipping through the forest creating some amazing sounds. In the distance, I'm sure we could hear the sounds of snapping and falling branches.
Bushfire track by seaworthy

sand and sky

A small number of shots taken on the beach dividing the lake and ocean. An interesting place to record as we were trying to avoid some of the obvious sounds of crashing waves and the like. We tried for some interesting sounds by allowing the hydrophone to wash around in the small waves that rushed up the step sloped beach, being covered and uncovered with sand in the process. Unfortunately, the results weren't spectacular by any means and few, if any, actually made it to the final album. We'll try to get some up on the environmental sounds blog in the coming weeks.

Tokafi reviews Two Lakes

Our friends at Tokafi have written a detailed review of Two Lakes. It is an absolute pleasure to have someone spend the time to review our album.

Music and ecology are not all that far apart: In both, establishing deep emotional ties with your subject gets easier if you realize that you, too, are part of the system. To Australian artists Cameron Webb (aka Seaworthy) and Matt Rösner, process and programmatics have therefore always been seminally important, their music representing ideas, aesthetics and philosophies just as much as pure, sensual enjoyment. There can be no such thing as passively consuming their work: To them, sounds are inherently connected to concepts, the acts of listening and sensing closely related to those of observation, reflection and understanding. While sharing similar points of departure, meanwhile, their oeuvres have hitherto dealt with these aspects from discretely different poles. While Rösner frequently sought for parallels between architectural principles and auditive expression, Webb’s output has revolved around the notion of mnemonic acoustic resonance – for his last full-length “1897”, the artist spent three months in an out-of-use ammunition bunker, listening intently into its innards to capture wordless stories and spatial traces of former activity.

If their 2008 split 3-inch on local label HelloSquare emphasized the delicately contrasting character of their approaches, their first true collaboration now takes a bold stab at an integral fusion. In April of this year, the duo travelled to a wildly beautiful expanse of forests, lakes and beaches in New South Wales – the “two lakes” mentioned in the album’s title are Meroo and Termeil, which form the heart of the Meroo National Park. Even though the aim of the undertaking was both to collect a wealth of sounds as part of a detailed acoustic field study as well as using their impressions as a creative spark for their interaction, there was never any clear-cut division between the two: Taping the environment and taking it in were one, just like Webb and Rösner did not wait until returning to their studios to commence composing. Instead, in between field recording sessions, they sat down with their array of folk- and sound-art-related instruments, including guitars, various percussion objects, bass ukulele, playfully tinkling bells and laptops, to translate their emotional landscapes into music. On the very last day of their stay, they even laid out these improvisations into first, tentative arrangements, in a bid of maintaining the spontaneity, stillness and subtlety of the sedgelands, streams and meadows in front of them.

This effort of capturing the immediate impulse has paid off. With just under six months between the recording stages of the project and the release of the finalized CD, “Two Lakes” is a prime example of how technology can actually serve to streamline rather than stymie the creative process if used by artists with a clear vision in mind. There are, literally, no borders between the inner sentiments of the duo and the outside world here: While the environment initially served as an inspiration for compositional sketches, its various emanations have, as part of an intricate feedback loop, turned into compositional elements. Pure field recordings and musical events, both those performed in situ and those processed and added afterwards, are not just closely and inseparably intertwined. Effectively, they have become a single layer of sound. From this point of view, whether or not the result is “objective”, “natural” or “organic” is completely irrelevant in artistic terms: The way some of the acoustic noises have been plastically spread out across the stereo image - as for example on cinematic “Meroo Sedgeland Pt. 2”, which juxtaposes gurgling water sounds on the left, the sound of delicate movements in the leaves and branches on the right as well as gusts of wind and distant bird song on the centre channel – matches Webb and Rösner’s wide harmonic drone-mappings, spreading out a plethora of either sustained or ephemeral tones across the sonic spectrum.

In unison, these elements create a space that feels entirely real, or even, on many instances, super-real – it is easy to see why someone like Rösner loves presenting his work in galleries and installational settings, where the music can unfold its immersive and psychedelic effect to the full. The outer movement of the music is reduced to the bare minimum in order to emphasise the emotional landscape opening up in front of the audience: The two extended drone pieces bracketing the record are essentially exercises in pure sonic coloration. On “Meroo Sedgeland Pt. 1”, Rösner and Webb work with just three pitch classes for the entire piece, a deep ground bass signaling the root tonality, while harmonically related material, either pitched up by various octaves or within close intervallic range, add luminescent overtones. By repeating, sustaining and retracting these intervals at different heights, they create a sense of development, without actually adding any new musical content. On the five shorter cuts sandwiched in between, meanwhile, the duo combine close-miced and open-space-oriented field recordings to form a mesmerizingly detailed image, which rewards attentive listening with a Mandelbrot-like uncovering of ever-new layers of sound. And the more one zooms in to dive into the deep, the more a real sense of silence and quietude begins to establish itself.

Increasingly, this self-created environment appears to be playing itself. When, on “Meroo Forest”, a mysterious cloud of drones and cavernous humming appears on the horizon, it is accompanied by complementary sounds of wind. And in the final minute of closer “Meroo Lake Pt. 2”, gentle guitar pickings give way to a peacefully babbling brook, which answers the guitar themes as though it were an instrument. In moments like these, the distinction between an objective physical reality, the subjective sentiments of the observer and later reflections on these events is exposed as superficial, covering up rather than revealing the true nature of the world around us. Recording and performing, too, are merely different sides of the same coin: In the act of composition, Cameron Webb and Matt Rösner have effectively disappeared behind their music, becoming part of the system rather than aloofly guiding it from a safe distance.

By Tobias Fischertokafi

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Fluid Radio Mix

Our friends at Fluid Radio invited Seaworthy & Matt Rösner to contribute an exclusive mix to their website in conjunction with the release of Two Lakes. The draws on many of our favourite artists, particularly those influenced by or incorporating field recordings in their compositions. Many of these artist’s works have inspired the pieces contained within Two Lakes, our debut collaborative release on 12k.

Fluid Radio

Brainwashed review of Two Lakes

Last year I reviewed Seaworthy's 1897, in which I was fascinated by Cameron Webb's careful balance of field recordings and traditional musicianship, often working together to create a sound where nature itself was the musical instrument. Working with like-minded artist Matt Rösner, the two use a similar approach, and the result is a work of the same spirit, but a different sound.

The album feels as much like ecological research as it does a piece of music. Based upon the duo's careful field recordings of the ecosystems at two coastal lakes in Australia, the results feel as much musically as it does as a living, breathing organism. They mostly mix unprocessed field recordings with treated ones, sometimes with pure musical accompaniment and other times alone.

Most are more of a hybrid, such as the shimmering drone of "Meroo Sedgeland Pt. 1," which marries subtle crackles of water, treated and natural, first with an expansive, gentle ebow drone that seems to stretch far into the horizon. Once the drone retreats, what remains is the sound of insects and frogs amongst the marshland, eventually augmented with gentle, sparse acoustic guitar. "Meroo Forest" is of similar character, combining birdsongs with a lower, sustained tone. Vibrating acoustic guitar strings add a subtle touch to what is more of an instrumental and nature duet.

The longer "Termeil Dunes" also carefully blends sparse, but deliberate tones, initially alone, but then paired with field recordings in a beautiful synthesis. "Meroo Sedgeland Pt. 2" is another where it is difficult to distinguish where the music begins and the nature ends, which is nothing but a compliment to the strength in which Webb and Rosner are able to marry the two. There seems to be a quiet digital texture carefully weaved between the sounds of nature around it, but it is so subtle it is nearly impossible to discern.

On other pieces, the sound of traditional instruments form the focus. "Meroo Stream" is a short piece that focuses on acoustic guitar plucking with occasional, but very subtle, treatments and the gentle sound of water behind it. The closing "Meroo Lake Pt. 2" is purely guitar for the first half of the piece, before it falls away to leave only the sound of water splashing about in one of the few situations in which the human and the natural sounds are distinct from one another

Two Lakes sounds like the work of four artists: Webb, Rösner, and each lake, as both the traditional playing of instruments and the calm sounds of nature contribute equally to the final product. There is a sense of life and timelessness that pervades the work and makes it perhaps one of the best statements of environmentalism possible, because rather than being just rhetoric, it captures the actual essence of nature amongst the songs.

Creaig Dunton - Brainwashed

Forest around the lake

Surrounding the two lake systems are extensive woodland and forests dominated by eucalypts. These forests provide habitat for a number of threatened species such as powerful owls, sooty owls, masked owls, glossy black cockatoos and yellow-bellied gliders. Closer the the lake edge, there are also pockets of swamp oak woodlands that provide an eerie link between lake and forest.

Many recordings made within the forest made it onto "Two Lakes", particularly a series of songbird recordings made at day break one morning. Also, listen closely to try and spot the eastern whip bird call somewhere on the album.