Elegy for the Sherbet Fleet

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0ujA3Q45qU&t=7s

Elegy for the Sherbet Fleet is just over 20 minutes long. A new song for soprano voice (performed by Eleanor Cully) based on a text I wrote, and a continuum of sound I created with a guitar, a harmonica, and some electronic things exists in counterpoint with audio-visual elements suggestive of a vague narrative of emptiness and filled with a pure plastic other.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0ujA3Q45qU

More Notes About Elegy For The Sherbet Fleet

It is important that what we make as artists actually exists in the world. Sound is pressure waves in the air, it is felt first and heard later, and can be made visible when it vibrates other materials like dust or liquids. Sculpture (usually) takes up space. Even very illusive media like written language or digital images have an impact, are sites for interaction and are physically present in their environments (even if only as a trace of ink on paper or a bit of heat emerging from a display).

For a long while now my work has focused on vague, ambiguous territory, trying to capture forms in their processes of coming into being or crossing over into perceptibility.

I recently decided to try to focus this effort on single subjects and focus on processes that trace out their own existence in the world rather than to enact mimicry of other phenomena or represent anything other than themselves. A great deal of the material I work with is collected from my everyday life. In collecting and re-presenting this, narratives weave themselves. There is a tension therefore between he narratives presented in my material and the raw presence I seek to set in process. Elegy for the Sherbet Fleet, a new piece of cinematic sound art, is to be viewed as a scene through a weather-beaten wooden window frame, as might be found along some abandoned seafront. Through this frame of nostalgia, and perhaps something essential traces out its own existence, tells its story and then disappears. Meanwhile the wind sings a song through bones, within a circle of ancient timbers buried near Gore Point along the Norfolk Coast, Uk. Something essential is there, out of time, but in reaching towards it narratives stir themselves up like a salmon stirs up mud in a riverbed.