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Scottish-Portuguese sound artist and producer SHHE (Su Shaw) releases her new album ‘THALASSA’ on May 15th, a six-part ambient work that gives voice to the Mediterranean Sea at a moment of ecological, political, and existential crisis.
‘THALASSA’ takes its name from the primordial Greek sea goddess, the personification of the sea itself, and unfolds as a sonic dive from submergence to emergence. Journeying through six stages of descent and ascent, the album is built around breath and transformation, drawing on Shaw’s time spent in Alexandria, Egypt, where she was “Musician in Residence” at B’sarya, a project supported by British Council in 2022. Originally commissioned to record the Mediterranean using hydrophones, Shaw found herself unable to capture the sea directly; Alexandria’s heavily militarised coastline prohibited sound recording, above and below the surface. ‘THALASSA’ is an attempt to give voice to a momentous sea that is often rendered silent, or actively silenced.
Shaw tells us, “Alexandria is fascinating. It's a city that is fated to be underwater - the city has already sunk twice - and by 2050, it's predicted that a third of Alexandria will be underwater or uninhabitable. I've lived my whole life in Scotland on the opposite banks of the same estuary - where the River Tay meets the North Sea. The project was an opportunity to research commonalities between both Alexandria and my home city of Dundee - where it’s also predicted that parts will be underwater in my lifetime. I began to explore our personal relationship with water; how we respond to change, to emergency, to crisis, to loss, how we accept that our existence is entirely dependent on and at the mercy of the sea.” These mirrored futures form the emotional and conceptual core of the record, prompting a wider reflection on how we respond to impending ecological disaster.
Tracklist:
