Codes Adrift

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 - have released 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.