A while after Matthias and I moved to Cape Cod in 2011, the sea began to seep into our songs. It was unavoidable. Even a simple walk on the beach connects you with the vastness of our earth’s life cycle. Every grain of sand used to be a shell, a rock, a mountain. Every wave that licks your toes marks a breath.
Our subsequent move to Woods Hole clinched the deal. If Woods Hole were a clown car, its oceanographic institutions would be its clowns. In this tiny town of ours, there are no fewer than 7 distinct organizations dedicated to the study and understanding of the ocean. Living in a community of ocean scientists, fishermen and other sea-obsessed folks of one sort or another, it didn’t take long ‘til I found myself watching simulcasts of research dives halfway around the world as my bedtime entertainment. So when George Ban-Weiss – environmental engineering professor and bass player – suggested we write a whole set of songs about the sea, it was like he had articulated an idea that was sitting right in front of us.
Our collective fascination with the sea is inherently as symbolic as it is scientific. Any exploration of the sea perfectly entwines our magnetic attraction to the unknown and our endless appetite for wonder and discovery. Water, quite literally, connects us all. That said, it’s a laughably large task to write a song cycle about the ocean, and it wasn’t until I read about Natalia Molchanova that I found a foothold of how to anchor our vessel in the sea of possibilities.
During a casual, recreational dive off the coast of Spain, Molchanova took a deep breath, dove to 35 meters, and never resurfaced. She was arguably the world’s best free-diver, holding multiple world records. She also wrote and spoke eloquently about the spiritual pull that free diving held for her. It was a place where she could transcend the “surface fuss” and both find and lose her self to a singular clarity and a focus. She spoke about the sense of disappointment at reaching the moment in every dive when she knew she must turn around and go back to the surface.
Her disappearance, as tragic as it was, allowed me to imagine that, perhaps, on her final dive, she was able to transcend the limits of her human form, and simply keep swimming, becoming a part of the ocean. And so the end of her story as a terrestrial surface-dweller became the beginning of her story as a witness to the deep.
While we were puzzling over how to introduce Natalia Molchanova’s character to the audience, we discovered a fictional radio piece produced for the BBC called Jump Blue, written by Hanna Silva. It is a monologue from Molchanova’s perspective that imagines her final dive. It quite literally took my breath away. On either side of the Atlantic Ocean, two teams of artists were working simultaneously on different sides of the same story. Jump Blue ends where Black Inscription begins. I reached out to Hannah Silva, and she agreed to re-work her words as a prologue to our piece, and to write a new text to bring us back to the shore again for the final two songs. In the songs between those two monologues, we explore different aspects of the ocean through Molchanova’s eyes, ears and body, as she becomes less corporeal and more simply a part of the ocean.
The title Black Inscription comes from Rachel Carson’s The Edge of the Sea, and refers to the intricate message inscribed by the micro-plants that appears the world over, wherever water meets rock. It is an invitation to learn and decipher all we can about the ocean from the small clues we receive.
Jeremy Flower, Matthias Bossi and I wrote these songs in the kind of blind tag-team exquisite corpse process that can only work with complete trust and a combination of obsession and abandon. It’s hard to say exactly who did what, but we each held an aspect of the songwriting in our sites: Jeremy created sound worlds worthy of our watery medium, Matthias kept our harmonic language fluid and moving, and I crafted words and melody lines through each song. Jon Evans anchored both our disparate studio sounds with his fabulous engineering intuitions, and our wide-ranging musical sensibilities with his deliciously satisfying bass lines.
Our wonderful design team, led by Mark DeChiazza, has helped us create an immersive world for these songs to live in. We owe a debt of gratitude to our friends at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, Tim Shank and Taylor Heyl, who indulged our many naive questions and taught us about their own fascinations and passions. Black Inscription is not a documentary. It is a series of impressions. But it is our greatest hope that it might inspire you to learn more about the very real issues facing our oceans. And perhaps to take a long walk on the beach. – Carla Kihlstedt