ocean – Page 2 – mariaology

Record Ekphrasis: The Long Ocean

~ https://thelongocean.bandcamp.com/album/the-long-ocean ~

There is a struggle, the suspension of hoar frost crusts time itself as it trickles over the sea. At first light we watch for an opening. Even in attics and city bedsits, the sea remains in our blood. We feel it cold as ice at the illness times: how darkly we sink into the sheets, hoping the pain in our skins will dissolve back to lucent matter, the night wisps of somebody else’s aura.

A voice enters soft and lo-fi, filling the interludes that swirl around haunted piano arpeggios, the silver streaks that spill on the ocean’s tides. I am afloat in muted clicks that keep me close to the surface, where the sound echoes in drips, as in a swimming pool. I listen for his voice as it mists the glass of the window. I inhabit that glass in the silence, waiting for some melody to sparkle with any dissonance sufficient to crack my crystal prison. Percussion is slightly hard, a clack, clacking. Crackle. Predictive appearance, seductive. “I’m under your spell / and I’m under under”. Subaquatic passion, staring at the world from beneath, behind, the film of its surface. See how everything shimmers. It’s quantum physics. You can’t peel off the surface of reality, its candy sprinkles, its gilt, to see what darkness and delight lies beneath; you’re already deep under, withdrawing, closing.

There’s the haunted aesthetic we find in Burial. Something more organic, elusive; the rural alternative to Burial’s empty midnight metropolis. On ‘Raindrops’ the muted sound of gulls weaves in and out of a DJ Shadow, Entroducing…..-era riff and the shimmering playful jazz of a brighter piano, a celeste of some sort…the sound of wind chimes through the minuscule ears of insects, so very high-pitched, so very sweet. You can imagine the tinkle of glass as you toast your favourite jellyfish, spirit animal that sucks its seven temporalities tentacular around it, moving them in sweeping undulations that rupture the cyclical moon-time of the waves. You open your flesh to the ocean, every salt crystal forming a bead in your pores. Desire is the fulfilling of absent substance, the spacing of the gap between lack and attainment. The passage of sailing, not knowing what darkness, what deep blue, you are setting off into, heart curved sharp by the cut of a crescent moon.

If Burial is, as Mark Fisher puts it, ‘London after the rave’, The Long Ocean is the abandoned nightclub pavilion, the sea’s dull roar mingling with those shadowy echoes of ecstasy. The slowed-down groans of a former generation’s momentary joy. Angels caught in the sand of an hour glass, being tipped, a largo mode of clock-ticking, grains of time slipping endlessly over the rasp of voices. I set this album to cassette tape, allowing the crackles to augment and mingle. I could be in the murmuring belly of a ship, hearing the rasps of a radio mix with this transcendent, nowhere music. It’s the sound of twilight set to reflections of quartz made bright momentarily by deepwater bioluminescence. What is that whine, that eerie peal? The sound of lost dolphins, the painful song of a lonesome whale? The whale is a heart’s darkness, a shadow-side of waking reality. You can lose yourself inside it, feel dreams close over you, prised from the wax, the oil-black skin.

Four Tet at his most otherworldly. Hypnotic loops, the soft distortion, the natural ambience. I am walking down an abandoned street, where weird green plants sprawl through the smashed-in windows of Brutalist buildings. Night birds chirp the tart remnants of forgotten songs. I am hooked on the wave-like rhythmic pulse of his words. My footsteps echo, down the street, down the passage, down the shallows to the deep where tarmac melts into oil-black sea.

There’s a sense of dark, spreading space, interpenetrated by twinkling scintillations; not unlike the plaza-like ambience of mallsoft and certain variations of vapourwave. Think: diamonds in the tarry pavement, stars reflected on the ebony surface of the midnight sea. A more crystalline James Ferraro, Marble Surf; The Long Ocean swaps those choir-like, ice-cream van speaker crackles for a more precise intricacy of lattice parameters, cross-rhythms of tinkling percussion and soaring, yet always subtle, beats. Think also of something like GOLDEN LIVING ROOM’s New Nostalgia, its eerie shimmers of late night lo-fi mixed with the bright sound files of near-future cyberspace, everything sounding slightly subterranean, that tinniness of dissonance. On The Long Ocean, however, instead of the glitch effects of hardware, the sounds chosen here are derived from natural materials and technics. The hollow click of driftwood, billows of cooling wind, cave-like echoes, the clinking of a necklace of shells with every percussive sprinkle (‘The Crest’). There’s a collector’s sense of amassed trinkets, effortlessly slinking along intricately simple bass-lines, hardened by industrial beats which burn in the weird space between background and foreground. What this music shares with vapourwave is a sense of slow, careful build towards the internal coherence of a detailed and evocative theme. The sadness and the beauty leaves its ghost stains on your brain, tugs at the blood which is full of the sea, makes you want to walk forever, or forever dream—rhythmic, contorted, returning serene.

Some of these tracks are totally devourable jams, the minimal intrusion of sampling giving way to those lusciously percussive beats, twists of lo-fi brass, crooning sexily over the building peal of mysterious beats (‘Gold Dust’). I’m reminded of a video game casino, an interlude space suspended in a three-dimensional, virtual world, where the colours and lights are all for our ersatz pleasure. On an island over an ocean we are sharing expensive littoral whiskies, toasting the way our skin glitters in its vitrics. Soon every vein will resurface, a curious craquelure marking time on the skin. Here we are, vacant, absent, deliciously distant.

Sometimes a roar of white noise, of wind rushing through a tunnel, subtly infiltrates a track (see the end of ‘The Crest’), reminding us that the space we’re inhabiting here is adorned by darkness and distance, is always deferring from itself. There’s definitely that Boards of Canada minimalism, the seamless weaving of samples in a way that seems hazy, reflective, a little haunted. A childlike naivety, a curious innocence; shadowed by the weight of a trembling void.

But there’s also a certain romance, even magic, to this record that I can’t quite pin to anything else. Not in the same way. Maybe it’s something to do with the celestial resonance of much of the track names, from ‘Star Light’ to ‘Gold Dust’ to closing beauty, ‘Stella Maris’. Latin for Star of the Sea, ‘Stella Maris’ is the feminine spirit, a protector who guides the soul at sea. This song is the album’s North Star, guiding us back through the waft and heft of its silvery, elusive currents. It sounds somehow out of time, built around the melancholy minimalism of a piano, sustaining its slow and careful path over the abyss of crackle, the tremors of the underworld, the ocean’s darkest depths. In the ‘Desecration Phrasebook’, a glossary collecting Anthropocene-related words, there’s a word, ‘shadow-time’, for ‘the sense of living in two or more orders of temporal scale simultaneously, an acknowledgement of the multiple out-of-jointnesses provoked by Anthropocene awareness’ (The Bureau of Linguistical Reality). We have to accept we are already living in the end of the world; it’s just that our sense of its time-scale is far beyond human comprehension. The fluid, amniotic ambience of ‘Stella Maris’, coupled with its fin-de-siecle, 1990s-style exploratory piano (think: Aphex Twin, DJ Shadow), creates this haunted sense of dual temporality, of always being on the cusp of something to-come at the same time as being homesick, nostalgic for a dreamland that came before but perhaps never was at all.

There’s something in the way this album romanticises the sea that suggests Glenn Albrecht’s word solastalgia: a form of existential distress caused by environmental change, global warming being the obvious example, as well as coastal erosion and the weather manifestations of climate change. Solastalgia derives from both ‘nostalgia’ and ‘solace’. Whereas nostalgia denotes a feeling of homesickness for a place and time we are no longer present in, solastalgia evokes that sense of distress caused by our home changing as we inhabit it, the affective impact of huge global shifts upon our individual, local experiences of landscape. The Long Ocean doesn’t leave us washed up at the end of the world, but suspended in the glittery salvation of its dark and strange and shimmering beauties. We come close to the weird and the terrifying, the dissonant samples of unrecognisable times, of creatures whose tremors rise up from the deep. Think of the pleasure and slight terror of binaural beats, the sublime understanding of our human insignificance as we gaze at the stars.

The beauty of an ecological thought is that it doesn’t have to be clogged with guilt, it can create something even lovelier before in its collective, technological and temporal possibilities. What would happen if you filled every room with solar panels, invited the creatures in, suspended your desire forever in those flickering, dancing refractions of light and sound and colour and life?

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Moira Buchanan Exhibition: All Washed Up

Last Thursday I had the pleasure of a day trip to Irvine to check about Moira Buchanan’s exhibition ‘All Washed Up’ down at the Harbour Arts Centre. Now I must say, although I was brought up in South Ayrshire I haven’t actually been down to Irvine since I was a kid – the days when we used to go swimming at the Magnum, or on school trips to the Big Idea (which is now sadly closed).

It was a bright and breezy wintery day and as soon as I stepped off the train that lovely clean briny smell filled my lungs and it was a bit like coming home. Irvine’s a fair pleasant town, once a port. You can walk along the harbour where ships still rest and along the front there are little gift shops and cafes with tinsel in the windows and the smell of coffee wafting out onto the street. I unzipped my jacket to feel the sun on my skin. It was midday and hardly anyone was around, but when I got to the Harbour Arts Centre there was a nice wee bustle about the place.

Took a photo of the hair left behind by a ginger mermaid.

The focus for Moira Buchanan’s exhibition is, as the title suggests, things which are washed up onshore. There is a pleasing openness to the exhibition. It’s light and airy, the pieces nicely balance a white sparseness with the intricate details of natural forms splayed upon the (handmade) page. Actually, it’s quite difficult to differentiate the natural from the unnatural here. Buchanan uses materials found along the beach to make her art, from plastic to twine and string, to seaweed and driftwood. Instead of simply presenting such materials as found objects, Buchanan’s reworking of their unique structures emphasises the beautiful details and aesthetic value of that which we might consider waste – environmental, human or otherwise. She uses an understated, organic palette and a combination of wispy, delicate lines and bold ink blurs to suggest perhaps the swirls of the tide and the sense of being washed out.

The exhibition has a pleasing, nostalgic feel to it; a favouring of simplicity and the fragile loveliness of form, the childlike excitement in finding beauty amongst tiny, insignificant things. Dotted around the exhibition are little poetry chapbooks made from handmade parchment. Each poem feels like a miniature gift, a token gleaned from the coast and the sea and someone else’s memory. I think in today’s world, where global warming feels like something vast, incomprehensible, beyond our understanding, it’s so important to focus on the little things. The material details that remind us that we are part of this environment, that the ocean gives back what we put into it. There’s a feeling of salvage to the pieces, whose composition seems to perfectly balance the artful openness to chance at the same time as reflecting a careful attention to arrangement and applied form and texture. Everything seems precious.

The more monochromatic tones of the video exhibit suggest something starker, more emotionally arresting. The poems on display recount strange dreams, the changing weather and shape of the coastline, the turbulence of time and human perception. Between the poems are black-and-white closeups of items washed up on the shore. There’s a sense of borders overlapping, of the lush fronds of the clear water coming up to drag back the wisps of shadows and words and memories. I think of black ink pouring on a page, printing through layers of paper like the epidermis of skin. Sinking, achieving a kind of sticky permanence. I think of oil spills coating the northwards ocean. Each poem afloat on the water, the black background of oil, achieving purity in white ink as if blanched that way by the sun and the waves, as seashells are bleached by the tide. Moonlight pouring on still waters at night.

Responding to an ad on Creative Scotland, I sent in a poem I wrote called ‘Fort of the Yew Tree’. It’s kind of channelling a few of the mythical elements of a novel I wrote which is set in South Ayrshire (titled, with some irony, West Coast Forever). ‘Fort of the Yew Tree’ is said to be the Celtic derivation of the name ‘Dunure’, which is a fishing village on Scotland’s south west coast.

I feel very privileged that one of my poems is on that video. This thing that I wrote, a strange and baroque wee baby, has floated out to sea and there it is, somehow washed up in Irvine, travelled through the channels of WiFi and email and typed back out onto some distant slideshow, time cycling in loops and repeating, each image and word again returning like a message in a bottle tossed out to the waves. I wonder who will find it.

Anyway, you can check out my poem along with many others in the video below, made by Moira Buchanan and existing as part of her exhibition. ‘Fort of the Yew Tree’ starts at 2:35 and it spans four slides.

You can find out more about Moira Buchanan’s work on her website.

Land of Boats & Rust & Sunset Metal

Eerie stillness, the still point of the stillest day. All of the western isles are supposed to be windswept, breezy, cold and white. The sky is never quite white, more a milky, ashen grey. An ink-stained clearness of upside-down water.

We’ve walked along the beach, along the shorefront of the town with its screaming islander kids on the green. The ice-cream diners lain quiet by winter. Daffodils swaying in terracotta pots, cats lounging on garden walls. Shop fronts of Easter displays, gold blue postcards and tall jars of sweets. We’ve walked ourselves back out of civilisation.

It’s so quiet here. The edge of the beach. You focus on the absolute intensities of nature, and that’s it.

The gulls, endlessly circling, squawking, cawing. The cry of a gull is always an echo.

The lapping of waves. A glassy, perfect, trickling sound. Clicking of our cameras. Metallic sound of rusted nails, grating against rocks as we walk upon them, crunching down matter. In the distance, dusk comes in colour, like someone cracked open a lump of cryolite, spilling its yellow fluorescence over the world.

A boy circles the road on his bike. We do not see his face; he is hooded, a messiah or a ghost. Later, he appears again on the ferry, then the train. Earlier in the day, we saw him meditating out on a rock, alone. He starts to embody some kind of fear, an omen. Like teenagers, we giggle.

You can drag your hand through the cold wet shingle and scoop out its shining treasures. We gather orange shells and red bricks which rub dusty colour onto the black of our jackets. Some shells are broken, yet still pearlescent. Nasty beasties quiver and squirm when we lift big rocks. We lift and scavenge and pillage, and then walk on. We are growing closer to the still place, the stillest place of the island.

An abandoned shipyard of sorts. Some of the boats are still in use: there are ‘For Sale’ signs and various parts of ship rigging, scattered haphazardly around. Lobster plots, lonely buoys, a trail of broken forks. A slipway coated in green sea slime. Some of the boats grow a strange, alien rust. It comes apart in circles, flakes away at the edges like millions of wrinkling eyes. A brilliant, ginger bronze. Piles of thick iron chains succumbing to the slow process of oxidisation, stung by exposure to the harsh salt air, harsh salt water. To drag a finger along a single link is to be cut with visions of a ship at sea. Billowing storms, sails failing amidst inevitable shipwreck. It’s difficult to imagine such disasters on this pretty island, yet there is an uncanny sense to this space, as if we have entered a secret porthole, discovered what was supposed to be invisible to outsiders…

The quietness recalls an abandoned filmset. Some unidentified source strikes the repeated sound of a gong, mixing with the steadily lapping waves. We wander this place for nearly an hour. We return to the quiet gloaming, the silver mist rising over the sea. The mainland is there to meet us, its blue shadows of mountain studded with lights. For awhile it seemed so far, but of course it isn’t. We find ourselves in Largs, then on the train back home to Glasgow.