The Bay of Broken Things

Cassette | 2017
Joshua Bonnetta - “Low Islands”
C26 single sided - Canto 10

This tape, a map of sorts, resituates recordings of five disparate islands into an archipelago built up from layers of sound fragments. A study in accretion and the sedimentary parallels of geological formations and sound design; islands imagined as repositories for environmental memory, above and below.

"I call the place I am writing now the bay of broken things. In the February storms, spume wraiths climb the hundred-foot cliff to fight and fall like bitter rain in the moonlight upon the cabin roof. The earth shakes from the drum roll of the surf. I lie awake and watch through the window beyond my bed. There is no ticking in my brain; this is the elemental night of chaos. This is the sea chewing its million-year way into the heart of the continent.

The caves beneath resound with thunder. Again those warring wraiths shoot high over the house. Impelled as though I were a part of all those leaping ghosts, I dress in the dark and come forth. With my back against the door, like an ancient necromancer, I hurl my mind into the white spray and try to summon back, among those leaping forms, the faces and features of the dead I know. The shapes rise endlessly, but they pass inland before the wind, indifferent to my mortal voice.’

Loren Eiseley One Night’s Dying from The Night Country

Created from field recordings collected at various low islands in and around the Baltic Sea from 2012-2015. Processed via cassette and Nagra 4.2 in Manhattan and Ithaca winter 2016.

Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi.