When the time arrives to bunker down, when the insides are under threat from the outsides, here sit I, ears tweaked to the luminescence within. A constant companion in this space for the last few weeks has been the second album, 1897, from Seaworthy, the outfit headed by Cameron Webb and including Greg Bird and Sam Shinazzi. Webb spent a number of months as ‘artist in residence’ with the Sydney Olympic Park Authority’s Arts program during which “Webb undertook a series of improvisations, compositions and field recordings within the bunkers and surrounding natural environment”
To be more precise to the material consists of predominately guitar driven sonic effects built into ambient drone environments. The pieces show an intimacy with the space created, building sonic resonance within, and treating the domain as intricate to the recording. A seeming naïve presentation disguises the wrought frame of a fastidious construction which reveals both the play of the spatial and sonic depth being examined. The final track ventures beyond the confines of the structure and includes a greater degree of field recordings, in the ‘pastoral sense’, which tends to indicate a destination found, or resolution.
Placing this in perspective with Webb’s work in ‘field based ecological research’, it is seemingly difficult to separate the life of the seaworthy from their acts, seeing all aspects as some sort of intimately welded act. What is conveyed in 1897 is more than a few sketches upon a place, being the decommissioned ammunitions bunker, that was built in 1897. To labor an obscurity to the task at hand, the album starts with the track Inside and through a number of tracks Ammunition 1-6, Installation 1-3 before arriving at the end, Outside.
It held a sort of narrative progression that spoke of the self of the journey inside, a radical act that places the self in separation to the world, wherein which the absent story of the ammunition of this place, the material of the separation as conflict and its cavernous dry echo is finally resolved in the movement to the outside. Where the idea of nature is formative base for material, and the idea of technology as an extension of nature, changed in form folding back on itself in description. The seeming deep irony of the idea of an ammunition bunker being the protector of the wetlands from encroaching development, in that it encapsulates the manifest aggressive tendency of human nature yet provides the necessary conditions for a natural habitat to thrive.
1897 is quite a listening experience, which description can hardly do justice, it opens up a scope of contemplation beyond its structural content and invites the mind to a greater scope of the idea of the environment beyond the romantic pastoral.
Innerversity Sound
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