bryant keith bayhan
sound
design—perform—educate
second origin
"...to say 'self' is to say 'landscapes', because landscapes are not backdrops. landscapes are characters and landscapes change and differ."
— Édouard Glissant
an inventory of perspectives on coastal landscapes, filtered by memories of relationships and love for others. filtered like water draining through sand, with traces left behind so that clean water can flow back out to the sea.
desert islands are important because they give us the image of the second origin. a place to restart. and not only restart, but confirm that any original origin was never meant to be the final one.
album
Recorded during the isolation of the 2020 pandemic lockdowns, Memories of the Far Shore is a collaborative work by Derek Schultz and bryant keith bayhan, both local musicians born and raised along the shores of the Morro Bay Estuary.
Emerging from a remote collaborative process of ideation and sound-sculpting, the music is an exploration of textural sounds relating to the estuary, its shorelines, the weather patterns of the locale, and the emotional tenor of the Mediterranean summers of the California coast.
Thematically, the record is a still-life vignette of a day on the Morro Bay estuary: low, cool breezes sweeping wisps of sea-smoke across the back bay, terns and pelicans circling and diving, the warmth of the encompassing sand dunes, the ceaseless sub-bass roar of the Northeast Pacific Ocean.
Musically, the album is a blend of bayhan's colorful tones and gritty textural soundscapes woven with Schultz's ambient-stoner rock guitars, organs, and bass grooves. These textures are set in a bed of kosmische synthesizer drones and electronic percussion, revealing a fourth-world music consciousness that makes the album feel like a transmission from a dream-world version of the California coast.
— Derek Schultz
films
gathering materials together into experiments to test how they float and swirl in the waves and backwashes.