Seaworthy: Codes Adrift

press:
This is real love-or-hate stuff.
There's no room for middle ground.
Some listeners will find Seaworthy hypnotic and meditative;
others will find them boring and self-indulgent.

Championing the DIY cause, sound&fury – a small label
run out of the even smaller backwater NSW town
of Nimmitabel – havereleased Codes Adrift,
the latest collection of soundscapes by Seaworthy,
in a limited run of 100 CD-Rs packaged in hand-made envelopes
with typewriter-written liner notes.
It’s this hands-on, dirt-under-the-nails aesthetic that had me attracted
to the positive pole even before I put the CD in my player.

Seaworthy is the brainchild of Sydney-based musician Cameron Webb.
A prolific songwriter, the oeuvre of Seaworthy is dense and lengthy,
much like the music the man creates. He doesn't write songs per se,
but follows the maxim "music is art" instead.
Webb employs wide brushstrokes from a musical palette
that consists of looped guitar, piano drones and field recordings.
His work in Seaworthy feels motivated by a desire to capture
infinitesimal epochs of time and explore the delicate relationship
between time and space and how you can't modify one
without affecting the other.

Codes Adrift ebbs and flows with the swelling and retreating
of Webb's swathes of guitar feedback.
It sways you like a boat marooned in the centre of a vast,
interminable ocean, pushing and pulling with subtle but powerful energy.
The two tracks included here – logically titled 'Codes Adrift I'
and 'Codes Adrift 2' – bear hardly any difference,
although the latter track breaks up Seaworthy's stasis
ever so slightly, stuttering like a scratched CD
and buzzing with the impending climax
(or anticlimax, depending on your outlook).
But both "songs" (to employ a rather indolent label)
hover on the same monochromatic tone for the entire length of the EP,
never swaying in their droning purity.
There's no resolute beginning or end –
it just starts, and it just ends. Like Webb's guitar,
you could loop Codes Adrift for eternity
and nothing would seem out of place.

It's here that people will either be
drawn in by Seaworthy's minimalist beauty,
or repelled by the staunch refusal by Webb to do anything more
than loop the same note for what feels like an undetermined period of time.
I for one found the whole package rather endearing:
the DIY casing, the lo-fi outlook and the hypnotic musical equilibrium.
Granted it pales as focal point sound,
but it thrives as a gorgeous, crystalline soundtrack to everyday life.

-Dom Alessio, mess+noise

Seaworthy is a Sydney group based around Cameron Webb
with a selection of releases on local and overseas labels,
as well as the self-published imprint Steady Cam.
Codes Adrift, a small run CD-R edition on Sound and Fury,
features two extended treatments of feedback tone,
atmospheric texture and restrained melody for guitar.

As the title suggests, the sound swells and settles
as if we are anchored in an estuary as the tide comes in.
Elsewhere Seaworthy employs environmental sound to construct work,
with Webb’s occupation as an ecologist suggesting
a concern with the representation of natural audio phenomena.
The guitar pieces on Codes Adrift share similarities with
the sounds that travel across the landscape and in amplified atmospheric interference.

The two pieces here resemble each other.
Within the pillows of feedback tone emerges a subtle melody,
which is interrupted in the second piece by tiny splashes of clipped silence
and distressed textures that disrupt the otherwise politeness of the piece.
A gentle control is asserted on the melody,
resolving comfortably with fragile blues shapes.

Codes Adrift recalls Seaworthy’s influences,
notably Oren Ambarchi’s guitar method.
This is relaxed and well mannered work that
gently floats past leaving a slight wash.

It's great to see Australian label Sound & Fury back
and kicking off with a very fine disc from Seaworthy.
This is a perfect accompaniment to seagazing with
quiet e-bowed guitar tones stretching to long-distant horizons.
Comes packaged in S&F's trademark envelope
sealed with wax and with a photo insert.