North Sea (Heave, Sway, Surge)

This installation translates the movement of the ocean into sound.

In October and November 2025, I made a buoy with a gyroscope (an instrument that measures movement). I was living in Margate, on the North Sea, and loved the way it moved: its moods, colors, how it ceaselessly changed day in and out. The movement felt like a metaphor for the experience of sound. So the piece is my attempt to translate that movement to sound in a very direct one-to-one way.

I also thought of this as a contemporary take on previous music inspired by the sea, such as Debussy’s impressionist symphony La Mer (which was inspired by Turner’s paintings, in another Margate connection), Mendelssohn’s Hebrides, or Eliane Radigue’s minimalist Occam Ocean series, among others…

The work consists of 534 vertical steel strings across three frames. Each string is tuned close to unison, creating a dense, monochrome field of tone with subtle variations in pitch and timbre. Visually, the strings appear as hundreds of fine vertical lines - something between a horizon and a field. Playing back a 25-hour recording from a single day in November on loop, the NORTH SEA becomes a durational piece of music played by the sea itself.