mark lyken: the terrestrial sea

Mark Lyken is an artist, composer, and filmmaker based in rural Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland. He creates musical and sound pieces, films, paintings, and installations. The Cromarty Firth is an inlet of the North Sea in the Scottish Highlands. It is an important and protected natural habitat of seabirds and marine mammals, yet it is also an essential berth of the oil and tourism industries. Based in a field station ideally located at the Cromarty Lighthouse, ecologists from the University of Aberdeen study how natural and man-made environmental changes influence the behavior and populations of the Firth's protected species. In 2012 Lyken was artist in residence at the Lighthouse Field Station, where he worked alongside the ecologists and recorded The Terrestrial Sea. He returned to the town of Cromarty in 2014 to collaborate on a companion film with award-winning filmmaker Emma Dove (this CD includes a link to the film). The Terrestrial Sea is the culmination of that work, highlighting the diverse and ever-changing environments that the ecologists are studying through music and film. The Terrestrial Sea is deeply imbued with a sense of place. While sonically evoking the drama and beauty of the land and seascapes of the Cromarty Firth it also explores the tensions that exist surrounding the natural and industrial world. The music combines real-world, electronic, and processed sounds, creating a sometimes incongruous soundworld of corroded melodies, percussive clangs, drilling platform drones, pile-driving booms, intensifying boat noise, local voices, the simulated sounds of weather, and the ever-present sea itself.