Cyclic Defrost (.COM)

This year saw the release of Australian artists Seaworthy and Matt Rösner’s ‘Deep Valley’, their third album on the 12k platform. Their previous works on the label, Two Lakes (2010) and Snowmelt (2021) were composed around site-specific locations, the first one around the Termeil and Meroo Lakes, and the second during a field recording expedition to Kosciuszko National Park.

Both well known to us at Cyclic Defrost, they’re essential sound archivists and composers of audio musical landscapes. ‘Map In Hand’ from Cameron Webb – Seaworthy- stands as a personal favourite, and Matt Rösner had some notable works on Room40. We took a deep dive in “Deep Valley’, recorded during a residency in New South Wales, and here is what we discovered.

Cold Weather
Evocative guitar motifs move around crackly soundscapes, looped brief wonders, and hypnotic tones. It’s a calm and meditative prologue with brushstrokes of reversed-like samples.

River Reflections
Like its title suggests, is a reflective piece of acoustic guitar loops echoing on tape hiss.

Fallen Trees On The Far Shore
Processed field recordings form a soft-static drone where humming sounds float over eerie tones and the occasional birdcall. Transitional and meditative. Contemplative.

Hidden Paths, Animal Tracks
As the longest piece of the album, it contains melodic dialogues between guitar tones, cleansing streams of soundscapes, the contrast between delicate heightened differences in texture and the pulsating reverb of frequencies from the electric guitar. There’s room for space between the sound conversation, and for the bell-like sounds to levitate, panned and evokative, towards the end.

Whispered Surfaces
Wildlife wrapped in strong winds as a preamble for a mostly texture-inspired composition that moves to a new stage rooted in its deepness. Mysterious and bucolic, it holds two dissociative spectrums, one with field recordings of animal blurbs and insects whirls, and the other with machine-like sound oscillations. While throughout there is the feeling of a forest night.

Boundaries
A hint of light comes back to the album through different takes on the sound of strings.

Beyond War, Winter Sun
Here the pair conjure an ephemeral aura that lightens slowly, as an ode to the energies of the sunrise, – until it is interrupted by all the previous anticipation channeled through a piano.

Floodwater Debris
Transitional drone vignette with touches of piano and guitar.

Drawn From River Water
This one’s sitting next to the idyllic campfire surrounded by memories of events that never happened.

Landscapes, Shared
Piano on reverb, birdsongs, fleeting rural imagery through subtle winds, and the feeling of nostalgia that every farewell has.

‘Deep Valley’ was made during a week stay at the Bundanon Art Museum, in a property that sits on the banks on the Shoalhaven River, surrounded by dense forests, inspired by a quote from the renowned artist Arthur Boyd, original owner of the estate, that goes: “You can’t own a landscape”.

This listening experience has something of a spiritual statement.