Olivia Wyatt & Bitchin Bajas - Sailing A Sinking Sea

Last year, filmmaker Oliva Wyatt invited Bitchin Bajas to add incidental music to the climatic sounds of her feature-length experimental documentary on the nomadic Moken people, Sailing A Sinking Sea. This new album release packages the soundtrack LP with a DVD of the film, thus opening several windows to the eternal questions posed on both formats and providing two distinct pieces of art coming from the same source. Sailing A Sinking Sea is a feature-length experimental documentary exploring the culture of the Mo- ken people of Burma and Thailand. The Moken are a seafaring community and one of the smallest ethnic minority groups in Asia, tradition- ally spending eight months out of the year in thatch-roofed wooden boats. Wholly reliant upon the sea, their entire belief system revolves around water. Sailing A Sinking Sea weaves a visual and aural tapestry of Moken mythologies and pres- ent-day practices. As a viewer you will swim under the sea past fishes and mermaids, sail boats across turquoise waters, land on 13 dif- ferent islands, step inside sea shan- ties on stilts, delve into the minds of shamans, become possessed through the worship of sea gods, dance between lovers and emerge drenched in Moken mythology. Bitchin Bajas were tapped to add to the already-existing raft of water sounds and other field recordings captured in the film. They were shown scenes, and with subtle directions from Wyatt, laid down music in the vibe of the environment, making particularly satisfying use of auto-harps in the process. Mark McNeill at Dublab did a mix com- piling film sounds and soundtrack pieces that gave the album an aquatic flow, with waves of water, Moken voices and songs and cascades of autoharp, synth, bells and flute lapping up against each other, producing a sense of time passing in its ultimate way—some- how timelessly; today twined with the epic tail of history and the million forgotten days stretching behind. The sound of the real in.