*200 copies limited edition* Bitter Sea collects 25 pieces from the most prolific period of composer Sean McCann’s early catalog. Recorded across California between 2008 and 2011, this two-disc set draws from tapes, CDrs, live recordings, and previously unreleased material. McCann made roughly 40 developmental albums during these years, mostly while living in San Francisco’s Sunset District and studying audio for film. Working from a small studio apartment, he recorded this wave of albums with violin, guitar, synthesizer, and four-track tape, steeped in field recordings of stretched water, compressed room hiss, and ruptured voices. The resulting music sits somewhere between pastoral ambient music, experimental composition, and domestic electronics: slow, melodic, and strange. Atmosphere above virtuosity. 

Rather than simply reissuing the original recordings, Bitter Sea sees the material edited into a more fluent representation of the period. Several pieces originally ran long and have been substantially reshaped for this edition, including selections from Fountains (2010), which has been revised into an album-length 40-minute sequence. The earliest piece, “Midnight Orchard,” was recorded in November 2008 when McCann was 19. These recordings first appeared in small-run editions through labels such as Cylindrical Habitat Modules, Ekhein, Avant Archive, 905 Tapes, Catholic Tapes, and Aguirre Records, as well as several self-released editions, produced in small quantities. Bitter Sea is a retrospective reconstruction, an attempt to present a “seductive digest” of this period without asking the listener to stay longer than necessary.

Sean McCann is a composer and sound editor based in California. He has operated the record label Recital since 2012. During the late 2000s and early 2010s, he released a large volume of experimental and ambient music through independent labels, while performing live and collaborating with other musicians and artists. He toured only once, in the fall of 2010 with Pedestrian Deposit, before moving to Los Angeles. In the years since, McCann has increasingly worked in sound for film and other media, developing a practice centered on recording, editing, and constructing sound worlds, as with his opera/radio play The Leopard. Bitter Sea looks back at the period when much of that vocabulary was first being developed: slow music shaped by fog and isolation.