Seaworthy, Matt Rösner

Deep Valley is a new work by Australian artists Seaworthy (Cameron Webb) and Matt Rösner, composed and recorded during a week long residency at Bundanon Art Museum on the south coast of New South Wales. The Bundanon property was gifted to the Australian people by renowned artist, Arthur Boyd and his wife Yvonne in the 1990’s. In making this gift, the Boyd’s opened a creative place for artists to immerse themselves in a truly distinctive Australian landscape. The property sits on the banks on the Shoalhaven River and surrounded by towering sandstone cliffs, dense forests and unique animal species that exist alongside historic studio buildings that were used by the Boyd family and many artists working in their footsteps. 

Webb and Rosner spent a week in the Musicians Hut and exploring surrounding wildlife sanctuary. All the pieces featured in Deep Valley were composed using recordings of sounds of the outside environment and weaving them with guitars, piano and electronic processing to create a new work inspired by Arthur Boyd’s famous comment, “You can’t own a landscape”. The statement rings true even more today and Deep Valley reflects that perspective and a desire to record ecosystems in states of flux and transition.

Seaworthy and Matt Rösner’s previous works on 12k featured the unique sounds of coastal wetlands, Two Lakes (2010), and the Australian alpine habitat, Snowmelt (2021) and whilst Deep Valley shares the same creative approach, instruments play a larger role against a subtle backdrop of birds, local waterways, and the wind swept woodlands and coastal heath. Boyd knew of the fleeting and changing visual nature of a landscape, and the aural world exists in parallel to this idea. Now, more ephemeral than ever. Our modern society is saturated by attempts to flood our visual channels and we’ve evolved to remember photos and the moving image at the expense of the complex auditory environments created by nature. The digital and ever present world has swept away pathways to a quiet space. Deep Valley, invites the listener to escape the zeitgeist, even if only for brief respite.