Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2000 15:44:00 +0100 From: "Gareth G." <[email protected]> To: "Gordon Sweeney" <[email protected]> Subject: new #3.02 press release Messages came, Johanna thought, usually years too late, or years before one could crack their code or had even learned the language they were in. Yet they came increasingly often and were so urgent, do compelling in their demand that she read then, that she do something, as to force her at last to take refuge from them.…A whole day would go by without her hearing or speaking a word. She did not buy the paper or turn on the television, and the one morning she thought to find some news on the radio she got a program in Finnish from Astoria. But the messages still came. Words were everywhere….She had noticed in earlier years that the lines of foam left by waves on the sand after stormy weather lay sometimes in curves that looked like handwriting, cursive lines broken by spaces, as if In words; but it was not until she had been alone for over a fortnight and had walked many times down to Wreck Point and back that she found she could read the writing. It was a mild day, nearly windless, so that she did not have to march briskly but could mosey along between the foam-lines and the water’s edge where the sand reflected the sky. Every now and then a quiet winter breaker driving up and up the beach would drive her and a few gulls ahead of it onto the drier sands; then as the wave receded she and the gulls would follow it back. There was not another soul on the long beach. The sand lay as firm and even as a pad of pale brown paper, and on it a recent wave at its high mark had left a complicates series of curves and bits of foam. The ribbons and loops and lengths of white looked so much like handwriting in chalk that she stopped, the way she would stop, half willingly, to read….But these foam words lying on the brown sand now had been written by the erasing sea itself. If she could read them they might tell her a wisdom a good deal deeper and bitterer than she could possibly swallow. So I want to know what the sea writes? she thought, but at the same time she was already reading the foam, which though in vaguely cuneiform blobs rather than letters of any alphabet was perfectly legible as she walked along beside it. "Yes," it read, "esse hes hetu tokye yo’ ossusess ekyes. Seham hute’ u."…As she read it over, backing up some yards to do so, it continued to say the same thing, so she walked up and down it several times and memorised it. Presently, as bubbles burst and the blobs began to shrink, it changed here and there…the water of the foam sank into the sand and the bubbles dried away till the marks and lines lessened into a faint lacework of dots and scraps, half legible. It looked enough like delicate bits of fancywork that she wondered if she could also read lace or crochet. When she got home she wrote down the foam words so that she would not have to keep repeating them to remember them, and then she looked at the machine-made Quaker lace tablecloth on the little round dining table. It was not hard to read but was, as one might expect, rather dull. She made out the first line inside the border as "pith wot pith wot pith wot" interminably, with a "dub" every thirty stitches where the border pattern interrupted. But the lace collar she had picked up at a second-hand clothes store in Portland was a different matter entirely. It was handmade, hand written. The script was very small and very even. Like the Spencerian hand she had been taught fifty years ago in the first grade, it was ornate but surprisingly easy to read. "My soul must go," was the border, repeated many times, "my soul must go, my soul must go," and the fragile webs leading inward read, "sister, sister, sister, light the light." And she did not know what she was to do, or how she was to do it. Just as the persona of Ursula Le Guin’s ground-breaking short story "Texts" struggles to hear the words that were everywhere, so we struggle to hear the inward messages of the world around us, none more so than in music. As the mainstream culture shifts more towards the sounds that are apathetically regarded as music, #3.02 Records values the complete collection of sonic experiences, particularly emphasising spoken word and the sanctity of lyricism. As such, #3.02 boss Gordon Sweeney and Sycophantic Records’ new Sycapoent, Adam Kirkman, have collaborated to bring the latest #3.02 project to reality, musicless songs with songless lyricism, in an attempt to strip away the surrounding cynicism from the purity of words that are everywhere, always spoken to us, if only we could hear.