Mark Lyken - The Terrestrial Sea - CD

"Genuinely breathtaking." ~ Aesthetica Magazine

"A surrealistic meditation on the way that different environments encroach on each other." ~ Financial Times

"The Terrestrial Sea is an important work because of what it represents: the acute awareness that arrives when the senses are used to their fullest extent." ~ A Closer Listen

Mark Lyken is an artist, composer and filmmaker based in rural Dumfries & Galloway, Scotland.
He creates musical and sound pieces, film, paintings and installations.

In 2012 Lyken was Artist In Residence at the Lighthouse Field Station where he worked alongside the Ecologists and recorded The Terrestrial Sea album. He returned to Cromarty in 2014 to collaborate on a companion film with award-winning Filmmaker Emma Dove.

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.

A link to watch the film is contained within the CD packaging.

From the Notes: The Cromarty Firth is an inlet of the North Sea in the Highlands of Scotland. 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 behaviour and populations of the Firth's protected species.

The Terrestrial Sea is deeply imbued with a sense of place. Whilst 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. 

The Terrestrial Sea (Taster) An Emma Dove | Mark Lyken film from Soft Error on Vimeo.

Mark Lyken | Monument (Official Video) from Soft Error on Vimeo.

Mark Lyken | Wetland (Official Video) from Soft Error on Vimeo.