Simeon Walker - Four Suffolk Sea Scenes

A Closer Listen

Serendipity is the phenomenon of finding valuable things without searching for them. When you’re fulfilled, this is just a happy coincidence, but when you’ve suffered a loss, it can be a profound, even quasi-religious moment. Nature can be a particularly rich source of serendipity, but in the years since we’ve become captives of technology, we often forget to open our eyes to it.

In order to understand the serendipty present in this album you need to understand something about growing up on the British Isles. On the islands, you can’t help but be aware of the sea. Even at its most distant, it’s never more than 84 miles away. It shapes everything we do, most stereotypically in our favourite conversational refrain, What The Weather Is Doing Now And What It Was Doing Just Ten Minutes Ago. Even if we have no plans to go near the coast, we enjoy listening to The Shipping Forecast: there’s something comforting about knowing that there in Cromerty there’ll be an “Easterly or northeasterly 4 to 6, occasionally 7 later; Moderate or rough; Occasional rain; Moderate or good, occasionally poor,” or whatever. If you’ve no idea what I’m talking about, see here: it’s a thing.

When Simeon Walker drove down to Shingle Street beach at 6am one morning during an artists’ residency at Butler Priory, he experienced serendipity:

My words cannot adequately do justice in describing the scene I was about to witness. Of course, I have photos and videos…but they can never do these moments proper justice. I was so very aware I was experiencing something so magical, so special, so unique, that I would regret it forever if I experienced it through an iPhone screen. The unique atmospheric conditions created a stunning panorama, which, when combined with the other-worldly landscape of Shingle Street, makes it hard to convey just how special and beautiful it was. I have never seen the sea so still, with barely a lap at the shore. Every sound: the gaps between the shingle filled by the gently-gurgling, placid sea; hordes of gulls, terns – possibly a gannet – grazing on Orford Ness, their squawks echoing shrilly across the glass-still inlet; and the faint tolling of the bell buoy, a mile out to sea, carried across on the gentle breeze. This was more than just a sight to behold; there was a sense of something spiritual at play – a special moment in time, as if made just for me, which I could have easily missed simply to avoid the 6am-alarm.

The resulting EP, Four Suffolk Sea Scenes, is an extraordinarily successful attempt to recreate that moment. Gentle piano combines with and echoes field recordings in a 15-minute continuous track made up of the four scenes: “Morn”, “Glass”, “Tide”, and “Quell”. It’s utterly beautiful, and especially so when considered in the context of Walker’s wider work, which has such a tendency towards mournful that he self-deprecatingly calls it “sad piano music”. From private conversations with the composer I know that there’s something tragic hidden behind that wry description, and that knowledge is perhaps why this piece moves me so deeply. Even without that private context, you can’t help but find something wonderful here: this is music about suddenly finding oneself in alignment with a universe more beautiful than you had thought possible. (Garreth Brooke)