“I was first influenced by aggressive sounds. I grew up close to a shipyard; many hours of rock and roll came from the radio where dock animals worked. It was always a mix of the Stones and waves. The ships brought goods in and out, and they did the same with music, musical cargo. I heard gazelle Dabke, Thai country, birdsong from Agadez, jungle slowcore, Sufi snake rock, and whale songs just by hanging around the port.

“I was also friends with many seals and seabirds. They were outcasts who knew the level of violence the land could unleash, but they also loved music from everywhere. We listened to the pulsations of radio pop as it distorted over the water. These friends were artists who first opened my ears to whole new levels of sound. These listening experiences alerted me to levels my rational mind could not perceive.

“But since the sea does not have the musical industry that land does, I only realized it was possible to be a musician professionally by looking around on land. I first tried playing drums with some land band, but that could not satisfy me, so I broke out on my own.”

Everyone would agree that your music is shattering, especially in terms of volume. Could you expand on your commitment to intense noise?

“I came to noise through a process of discovery. What could my body withstand, what could other bodies withstand? Could we find a still point in a storm? Almost technical. I wanted to reproduce street noise, machine noise, construction noise, but also trench noise, wave noise, and mesopelagic noise all at once. What I make becomes a space to meditate inside. A lost sphere or temporary autonomous zone.

“For the sea-bound, sounding is like breathing. The whole body is—and is in—sound. From the sea I learned that shattering sound could heal and that the whole body was sounding all the time. So, although those on land think I am always loud, those in the sea also know I have a whole level you would call silent. I think intense noise has become my way of communicating the plight of the seas to those on land. In that way, loud noise is more political, I suppose.”

Political in what way?

“You see, I have made my life with many seals. They taught me to swim, to be at peace in the water. I think they are my community, and I want to transmit their feelings or what I understand of their feelings into something those on land can comprehend. I can be both in sea and on land. One webbed paw in each realm. And the violence between them is unbearable. But really it is not between, it is one-sided. There is violence perpetrated by land against the sea. There are kinds of violence that flow through every part of the sea and yet remain almost invisible to those on land. There is the chronic noise of ships, propellers grinding, huge explosions of low frequency that create a bed on which we are forced to lie. This has been the case for generations, as the land has industrialized.

“But companies also use air guns to search for fossil fuels. They are six or seven times louder than ship sounds. Many companies are using these nonstop, every ten seconds, for months at a time. It starts as a big bang and changes to a reverberating fuzz. I think many on land imagine the ocean as a quiet place. Those in the sea are living through endless, shattering storms. So, what I try to do is return the noise land companies are imposing onto the sea back to those on land. This is my form of resistance.”

Do you need for your audience to get these ideas to understand your music?

“I have written many things about the sea struggle. I think that the curious will educate themselves. To communicate, one must take the indirect route.”