Martyn Ware / Charles Stooke / Gabriel Ware
It’s Always Ourselves We Find in the Sea
UK COLD SPRING CSR349CD (2025)
A little untypical of this label’s general aesthetic, this one’s more of an “installation soundtrack” than an album proper; to best experience the whole thing, I suppose you’d have to visit it at the Saatchi gallery, where it takes its place in the culture as an “immersive” viewer thing, which seems to be the computer-driven trend affecting everyone and everything from David Bowie to Abba to Van Gogh (I see now there’s also one for a giant digital game of Monopoly).
I think it’s mostly the work of Martyn Ware, although it’s also a part of the company he founded with Vince Clark called Illustrious, of which sound designer Charles Stooke is a co-founder and who provided the 3D ambisonic sound design. Gabriel Ware is also credited with composition and orchestral arrangement. Martyn Ware has come a long way since The Human League and Heaven 17; his Illustrious company has been creating large-scale events like this for over 25 years now, with some big-name clients and international locations. It’s Always Ourselves We Find in the Sea intends to tell us something about mankind’s relationship with water, telling a simple story about the circle of life. With its combination of ambient sounds, musical swirls and field recordings, the record feels like something that has been done before, and much better, on the Touch label – for instance by Chris Watson, Philip Jeck, or Biosphere, all gifted observers and documenters of the global environment. Oddly enough that label did give a home to another Sheffield electronic original, Richard H. Kirk, on such records as LoopStatic and Darkness at Noon.
Ware’s piece is well-produced, very layered and kaleidoscopic, but sadly feels too soft-centred on today’s spin. I don’t mind the lack of a compositional structure; it’s clearly designed as background sound for grazing spectators who wander around the installation. But it’s not saying very much of substance about the chosen theme. If Chris Watson were doing this, he wouldn’t hesitate to remind us of the ecological dimensions of the story, and point out the environmental damage mankind is continuing to wreak across the globe. But such weighty matters don’t seem to register on Ware’s radar. The original installation itself may have been visually sumptuous, but you wouldn’t know it from the artworks of this album; instead, four panels of the digipak are given over to photo portraits of the talents involved, along with promotional self-serving career blurb such as you’d find on a grant application to the Arts Council. (07/04/2025)