The Silent Ballet (.COM)

Seaworthy is the project of Sydney’s Cameron Webb.
1897 is the second longplayer after Map in Hand in 2006. It belongs on 12k.
It is heavy on minimalist guitar textures and re-recorded installations of field recordings.
It was recorded at the site of a hundred year old decommissioned ammunitions bunker in Newington.
The longplayer is named after the bunker’s year of construction.

It is a profoundly poignant piece of work. It inspired me to write this poem.

Oh 12k, what refuge you provide for the lonely and the broken-hearted

In the quiet space he sits,
Atop an endless valley that breathes,
A breath of swollen supremacy,
Shattered and torn,
Broken, like the refracted rays of distress,
Or of comfort.

It is warm and brilliant.

Oh hear the wails of the naked atmosphere,
The illumination of doubt,
Without flux, without field,
Without sleep.
No power, and no outage,
Only the blending of indigo and deep violet.

And yet here she comes.
And goes.

Here she leaves,
Her eyes bitter, his lips dry,
His fingers over the rusted cake of steel.
Her voice whispers, “don’t wait, me, I’m no longer,”
Echoing in his frail psyche,
Abandoned in some kind of timeless corridor.
He sits to watch.

Don’t face her,
But let her face the sea.

To think of it as a “trance-like” state has already been flogged to bits. Go beyond that. It is the essence of sound that constructs our feeling. The minimalism of 1897 demands an affective absence of its sound, as much as a stirring presence. The alternation between stripped-down a guitar track, to the layered warmth of guitar-induced textures, to the simplest sparse chirping of garden biology, makes this very much an experience that trascends the need for descriptors. The only effective referentiality here is to cushion your own ears against the padding of some cans and hear what you will feel.
-anonymous