between me and the sea

 When I was young I used to hold sea shells to my ear and listen to the sound that I truly believed to be the sea. Between me and the sea has been around for a long time, since 2017. During that year, I pulled the plug on the classical composition degree I was halfway through. One of the reasons I felt like I needed to step away was that I wasn't able to write music that felt genuine to who I was, I was required to write music that would tick academic boxes. The main motif in this piece came about in the midst of my frustration at having to write music that didn’t resonate with me. When I got bored of unfruitfully forcing the creative process, I’d end up playing the main motif you can hear at the beginning of the song. At the time, I felt like I was procrastinating but in hindsight, my own music was telling me that I wasn’t where I was supposed to be. 

Since then, between me and the sea has been in my back pocket, appearing when I sometimes sat down at the piano, hoping to find inspiration to finish the song, or at least the motivation to start playing music again. Between leaving university in 2017 and moving to Te Wai Pounamu in 2022, very little was added or changed to the song. I knew I wanted the motif to emerge slowly; you'll hear notes begin to randomly appear amongst the sea sounds, created by pressing the piano keys halfway down so that only some strings in the piano are actually hit by the hammers. I gradually add more energy into the hands, adding more weight to the keys until finally the whole motif was recognisable. As the song gained more momentum, it naturally ebbed and flowed as though I was moving those sea shells further away from my ear and then bringing it in close again, while also mimicking the rhythm of waves building and crashing.

I'm sure many people can relate to this - when trying to start a new habit or build a new routine, I always feel like I have to start on a Monday, or the first day of the month or year, or wait until I've moved into a different house. It always has to line up with something in my life that often has nothing to do with actual routine or habit itself. Since leaving university, I had that with music. Every time I moved house I told myself that this would be the home I would set up my instruments and write and record music because I knew that it was something I'd love doing. Yet until 2022, the closest I ever got was making average recordings of half baked ideas on my phone. So, when I moved house, left the city I’d never left before, moved away from friends and whānau, and started a new job within the space of a week, I had no excuse not to try implement a new habit and set up a makeshift music studio in the lounge. Apart from the aforementioned half baked and averagely recorded ideas, between me and the sea was all I had to go with, so naturally it became the springboard for this project, the key that helped unlock the creative block I'd felt since 2017, and the reason why it’s the first track in this collection of music.

The centrepiece in my lounge-filling makeshift studio is my grandmother's upright, iron framed piano I was given by my grandfather a few years ago. It's soft, slightly muffled sound combined with it's travel induced dodgy tuning was perfect for the music I wanted to create. A few years before that, I was given an old, second hand Korg MIDI keyboard but always felt too intimidated by electronic music to try set it up. I knew that one day I was going to learn how to use it, and that the synths I would have access to would make my half baked music sound a little more baked, but I never plucked up the courage until after making the several changes to my life all at once. Turns out, after all that, it was actually quite easy. I finally knuckled down and recorded the five year old motif, added a synth bass and an ethereal high synth, sat back and listened over and over again. I felt a huge sense of relief that I'd finally managed to making something happen, and also excitement for the potential that lay ahead. That day I said to my partner, Claire, that I finally felt like I had found my sound. The rest of the song almost wrote itself after that. Ideas were flowing, inspiration was pumping, and I was freely writing music again.  

In the early stages of between me and the sea, you'll hear the swelling and relenting energy of the sea. The sea is always moving, through both tide and swell, and so is this song. Sometimes the energy is slow, lilting and lethargic, predictable, other times it is chaotic, unbalanced and out of time, and moves with more urgency. There are three different sections, the first is rhythmically simple and predictable, in the time signature of 4/4. Through this section I imagine standing knee deep in the sea, feeling the sand shifting beneath my feet with the push and pull of the foamy water around me while looking out to the rhythmic rise and fall of neat, predictable waves, held up by a gentle offshore breeze. 

The second section brings with it a sense of urgency and subtle chaos, in the same mesmerising way that clapotis is created when wave energy travels back out to sea and collides with the incoming energy. This instability comes from taking away the last note of the motif, changing the predictable 16-note riff into a 15-note pattern that just doesn't sit quite right. As that rhythm changes, two synths enter the fray; an ethereal high note that you may not have noticed has been there for a while, and a deep, rich bass line. These two elements come from distinct images I have of being in the sea. The high synth is like being under the water and looking up to the surface, blowing bubbles and watching the rays of sunlight catch them as they rise through the light blueness. The bass synth comes from memories of jumping into the sea off a sailboat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, several days away from land, and knowing there is 6000 metres of ocean between you and the sea floor. These two simple notes suddenly gave it verticality; a floor and a ceiling for the rest of the song to be created within. 

After adding these two simple elements, and whilst feeling like a pro for figuring out how to use my MIDI keyboard, the rest of the song almost seemed to fall out of my fingers. After years of going around in circles with this song, it was finished within a few days of introducing the electronic element to it. Since finishing between me and the sea, I've felt so much more motivated and inspired to write more music, which is why this is the first track on inside view.