Following their first abstract-ambient-industrial jazz collaboration, capturing the rewilding of decayed industries on ‘Romney Marsh,’ the sequel in their triptych, inspired by landscapes of the Sussex coast - where Keith Rodway (Good Missionaries / Column 258 / Necessary Animals / Anthony Moore) and Eugene Kalamari (gloppaddagloppadda / solo artist) reside - is ‘Seven Sisters.’
The Seven Sisters white cliffs and winding Cuckmere River are one of the most unique and distinct landmarks in the world. A series of seven peaks terminating abruptly into sheer chalk cliffs, spanning East Sussex and the South Downs from the Cuckmere River to Eastbourne. It is said that sailors named it such for their resemblance to seven nuns beckoning them safely to land; their white robes cloaked by green habitat. From west to east – Haven Brow, Short Brow, Brass Point, Flagstaff Brow, Rough Brow, Bailey’s Hill and Went Hill Brow.
The people who worked these lands altered little of it. It really shaped them and consequently took on legendary spiritual significance, influenced by successive invaders as the closest landmass of access from the European continent. As well as the land and sea providing sustenance; legal and illegal trade and being the bulwark of national security; all of such required heroic deeds of protection and maintenance by local inhabitants at the behest of successive rulers and landowners. Oral storytelling even speculates a tenuous link between a Sussex farmer and Utnapishtim in the eleventh tablet of the Sumerian poem The Epic of Gilgamesh; the legend of a global flood in which the farmer saves his livestock by building a great boat.
They have been linked with the Pleiades Constellation (seven doves) of Greek mythology – Sister Alcyone (queen who wards off evil / storms); Sister Taygeta (long-necked); Sister Elektra (amber, shining, bright, to flow or run like water); Sister Celaeno (swarthy); Sister Merope (eloquent, bee-eater, mortal); Sister Sterope (lightning, twinkling, sun-face or stubborn face); and Sister Maia (mother, nurse, the great one).
And even to seven demons: “On this very day, as evening approaches, the first is (like) a fox that drags/shuffles its tail, the second being sniffs like a domestic dog, the third, like a raven, (its) bite pecks larvae, the fourth overwhelms like a huge carrion devourer vulture, the fifth being, although not a wolf, falls upon black lambs, the sixth being hoots like an owl, which resides in ..., the seventh being is (like) a shark (that) darts across the waves” (Hymn to Hendursag a 46-48, 77-84).
These are the influences encompassed in location recordings and random rhythms generated by natural forces of wind, sea, rock, water, wildlife and light – location recordings: the slapping of sail-mast lines; waves hitting a beach groyne; shale sucked back upon itself; sluicing of bowls in running water; the nettle of metal brushing metal, bouncing steel-plate and a rusting gate. Add to this the spirals of Keith Rodway's sinuous synths riding thermals, the euphoric and misty horns of Sebastian Greschuk, and oblique rich tangents of Eugene Kalamari's keys and final onerous choral requiem; we get a feel for the land’s mythical significance. The seven tracks of approximately seven-minute duration originate from a single seven-minute recording by Rodway, stretched and filtered by Kalamari to form the forty-nine minute gently rising ambient substrata, from which the Seven Sisters nuns / stars / peaks rise. ‘On Rocks’ – a poem from ‘Sublimation: a love affair with the sea’ by Kendal Eaton – (soundingoffuk.com/sublimation.html) – takes us deep within the mineral compaction and geological origins of this transcendent topography. Individual track information is allusory and derived from varied historical versions. But then the Greeks never let contradictions impede a good myth.