A Closer Listen
Losing the Sea has gone through various incarnations, beginning with its original release on Mare Nostrum earlier this year. Now that remixes and original sea recordings have joined the lineup, the package finally seems complete. As a kind bonus, no matter which version a person purchases, the other is included.
Losing the Sea is about longing for the sea: a feeling of loss following a move from Australia to Paris. Karen Vogt pours abject longing into ambient compositions with wordless vocals, sounding less like an elegy than a love letter. On two of these tracks she is joined by guitarist Guillaume Eymenier, with whom she also forms the musical duo Galán/Vogt. Eymenier’s field recordings also feature prominently in “Searching for Shoals,” which we’ll cover in a bit. But first, the title track, where pensive guitar meets peaceful ambience, an introduction to yearning and a kind way to begin the album proper. On the remix disc, the sequencing remains the same, but the changes are palpable; France Jobin extends the time, shifts the pitch and holds the vocal in reserve.
In like fashion, “Stranded by the Spring Tide” becomes as much a collaboration as a remix, with Lucy Adlington adding drones and distortion. She builds on the pinging and “winch” noises of the original, and the dynamic contrast suggests a less than placid sea. The additions are welcome, as they push the remix album past the breakers and into uncharted water. An even wider dimension is added with Jolanda Moletta’s music video for “Night Sloughing,” in which the sweeping of a hand across sand becomes that of brush on paint, the paint recalling the sea, coming full circle. Unlike the album version, the video includes the sound of waves and is better for it: a facet caught and corrected by the release of the cassette. Vogt is hearing the sea while singing about the sea, so we need to hear the sea as well, and in this case, seeing is yearning. Jolanda Moletta’s remix also gets its own video, a single shot over a vast expanse. In this version, the vocals of these women mesh without instrumentation, like sea without land.
France Jobin returns to remix duties on “Watching the Ninth Wave,” which preserves the light distortion of the original. Again the track is extended, Vogt’s voice becoming the central breakdown in the center like an inversion of a trance track. But “Amidst the Sea Fog,” the shortest piece, receives the largest transformation, as Claire Deak adds accordion, vibraphone, waves and Tony Dupé’s violin. Somehow the peaceful track stays peaceful, although now it seems more of a scuba diver than a snorkeler. The original album’s most striking piece, “Searching for Shoals,” begins with such field recordings, waves crashing against bouldered shores, prompting the memory in ways that music and vocals alone cannot. Vogt’s vocal loop is threaded through the waves like a changing tide.
In the remix, Vogt changes her own script: the time is cut by more than half, the vocal “softened” and the waves separated into what will become interspersed tracks on the final version. Now the sound of the sea is no longer something one must wait for, a deferred gratification akin to that of the artist; instead, the listener is treated to the aural memory and its reflection in real time. Or ~ and this is the beauty of the digital era ~ one may play all the ocean recordings in a row and ease from the rolling music to the sound of the shore. We applaud Vogt for including everything in a single package, as listeners need not decide which album they prefer, only which format. More than anything, we hope that this summer she is able to get to the sea. (Richard Allen)
Wed May 31 00:01:29 GMT 2023