Night Swimming by Distant Animals

It’s 3 in the morning, and I’m watching the same small handful of humans swim, back and forth, across the dimly lit pool. The nightclub opposite has started kicking out, the sea has started threatening the pebbles behind me, someones screaming from the slip road, and I’ve got another hour to go. Every sound is an ocean, every noise cavernous, arriving already complete, and I have only one job - to not disturb anything. The world is a fragile economy, and I’m pleading with it, as quietly as I can, to last just a little longer.

‘Night Swimming’ encapsulates a nearly two-hour live recorded soundtrack to an all-night swimathon, constructed on a modular synthesiser and radio receiver whilst cheering on long-distant swimmers in an outdoor pool on one of the coldest nights of the year. From my perspective, as its creator, it represents a compositional victory - the quietest, most minimal I could possibly be, a repost to my normal tendency for melodrama.

Distant Animals

Distant Animals is an electronic and experimental composer from Lewes, UK. He runs the Difficult Art and Music label, as well as the MEANS grassroots culture magazine.
His work explores conceptual themes of the relationship between there avant-garde and the everyday.