I have had a long love affair with the sea and since a toddler, I have spent many many hours rock pooling. There aren’t many days when I don’t go down to the seafront and take photos and sound recordings and both are the basis of this track - Cosmic Rockpool - for the Music Weeklies Challenge hashtag 'Local Patch'.

A couple of weeks ago we had a short spell of relatively warm blue skied days, which is unusual as we suffer from cold North winds and grey cloud cover a lot, even in Summer.

I recorded the tide on the turn, with added gulls and dog frolicking in the sea but as usual when I got the recording home to listen to, it again proved why I am not a bona fide field recordist. There were anomalies, wind blow, and sundry ephemeral noise, which ordinarily would have been cut and deleted. However, I thought that some of the patterns and sounds would, with some processing, make some interesting seashore and creature noises and looking at my photos of the rockpools I began to compose, Cosmic Rockpool.

Why the title?

Rockpools are tiny micro Otherworlds, like distant planets with their own environments, terrain and life. Here, there are limpets, anemones, winkles, barnacles, tiny crabs and many varieties of seaweed. With the main field recording as a base, I added sounds to represent the tide turning, washing into the pools and the cosmic otherworld that’s full of life and colour, being tossed about by the incoming waves. As with most of my work, it’s best listened to through headphones.

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Click on the links below to read about the other works in the Vinyl Outcry series.