Maersk

“simultaneously beautiful, startling, and haunting” - Foxy Digitalis

Digital Download: Boomkat CDs: sold out

A record I made in 2010, dealing with space, place and presence: in sound recordings, and everyday experience under late capitalism. ‘Place’, in wealthy countries at least, can increasingly seem like another immaterial commodity - reduced to atmosphere or colour, divorced from cultural and economic context, and deployed for entertainment. Before the pandemic it was easy to imagine that travel and commodity exchange were frictionless and largely digital. I wanted to draw out the inequality and detached sadness in this experience, and ground it in the heavy, material conditions that in reality make it possible: the hidden movements of container ships: vast, grossly physical things, propelled by gradients of global economic inequality and leaving a trail of environmental damage.

Reviews:

Boomkat: Album of the Week/Highly Recommended - “Amazing debut collection… a deeply engrossing and peculiar soundworld”

Fluid Radio: “Every piece… is an outstanding achievement and taken as a whole, really encompasses the epitome of cinematic sound art. Each work feeds off one another, building to a climax, on “Emma”, that will leave listeners speechless, and this writer, wordless. Getting there is quite a joy to behold.”

The Wire: “There’s an eeriness about the containerisation process, about the automation of the ports and the loneliness and of the ships, and this is what Maersk, with it’s radio broadcasts, piano, electronics and half-erased field recordings, conveys so powerfully.”

Freq: “the musical equivalent of a Mike Nelson installation, in which paradoxical clues scattered around uncanny locations encourage a kind of forensic examination, positioning the listener as a Lovecraftian detective attempting to trace the tracks left by someone or something that is at once human and altogether unknowable.”