RED MOON (musick & other arts)

NURSE WITH WOUND
SALT MARIE CELESTE

Original Issue: 2003 United Dairies ( UD104CD)

Reissue: 2005 United Jnana (2001 CD) Buy this masterpiece here!


Margot-meter: 4,5 moons / 5

1 Salt Marie Celeste

This work is inspired by the ill-fated story of the Marie Celeste brigantine. Read more here!

From Viennese Waltz:

The decline and fall of one such vessel is evoked with glacial power on Salt Marie Celeste.

This fully realised, hour-long version is one of NWW’s most radically minimalist pieces. It consists largely of a single, looming electronic figure, repeated endlessly like the motion of the waves. This incredibly dark and doom-laden sound is punctuated by regular bursts of eerie effects – first a lonely foghorn, then the breathing and creaking of wood, and finally the constant advance of water.

Energised by relentless stereo panning, the piece describes a shipwreck as a giant arc of progression and descent.

There are distinct similarities with Gavin Bryars’ epochal The Sinking of the Titanic, although the differences are also clear.

Bryars’ ’70s masterpiece takes as its starting point the poignant testimony of several Titanic survivors that the ship’s band continued to play as the ship went down, heroically refusing to abandon their positions and thereby providing the tragedy with a fitting soundtrack. The Titanic itself, meanwhile, was a mass of lively activity in the first days of its doomed maiden voyage, while its sinking was a monument to human folly and hubris.

Stapleton’s ship cradles no such vitality, and its sinking tells of no heroism or ambition. This music speaks only of darkness, of isolation and of watery death.

Richard Rees Jones