Prize-winning Adelaide author Sean Williams is well known for his apparently inexhaustible output of speculative fiction for young people. His realist novel Impossible Music (Allen & Unwin, 2019) is a fascinating portrayal of a young musician who must cope with suddenly becoming profoundly deaf.

 

Williams is also a senior lecturer in creative writing at Flinders University.

 

On top of all that, Williams is a composer and, writing under the moniker TheAdelaidean, he has released over 25 albums of what is broadly categorised as ambient music.

Ambient music has a long history, dating back to the first electronically produced music of Pierre Schaffer and Eliane Radigue and even before that to Erik Satie’s Furniture Music.

 

Ambient music is often arrhythmic and may appear to have little or no structure, so that the listener is immersed in long-duration tones and textures. Brian Eno is said to have coined the term ‘ambient music’ and is one of its principal exponents.

 

Ambient music stimulates an awareness of sound quite different from that induced by the melodic development, harmonies, rhythms and modulations of ‘conventional’ music. It may be produced using any form of instrumentation but is commonly created electronically, sometimes with recorded samples of live performance or of environmental sounds — musique concrète — which may be transformed, manipulated and repeated, and there can be similarities with Minimalism. The effect of such music is often soothing, and listeners might let their minds wander rather than focussing on the origin or nature of the sound as it progresses.

 

Williams’s work is frequently innovative and explores ideas beyond the simple generation of sound. For example, his three-CD, three-hour and 48-minute album, Hyperaurea (2023), is a sonic evocation of Antarctica and is accompanied by a detailed and enthralling memoir of the time he spent there on an Australian Antarctic Division Arts Fellowship. The album’s launch at the Flinders University Museum of Art was accompanied by videos of Antarctica, making for a thoroughly immersive experience for the audience.

 

Williams’s latest release, Nine Breaths, departs from his recent work in that it introduces the Japanese poetic form, the haiku, a form which he notes is short enough to be recited in a single breath. In the Japanese tradition, haiku typically comprise three lines of five, seven and five syllables and convey a momentary perception or elicit a sudden awareness, usually of a natural phenomenon. In its English form, the number of syllables is flexible.

 

For Nine Breaths, Williams has written nine haiku and a piece of music to accompany or evoke each poem. The first eight compositions occupy one CD and the ninth occupies the whole of a second CD. There are programmatic elements in some of the pieces and what sound like sampled elements.

 

The poem Loss is as follows:

 

in the throng
familiar perfume
— loss, found

 

In the composition for Loss, we hear ethereal synthesised music accompanying a voice reciting an excerpt from the poem Tatiana’s Letter from Alexander Pushkin’s Eugen Onegin. The emotionally charged reading is said to be by A Tarasova and it’s presumably taken from Russian actress Alla Tarasova’s 78 rpm recording of 1917.

 

Tremble in Worship goes:

 

upraised palms
tremble in worship
— spring shower

 

In the composition for Tremble in Worship, there are periodic, booming beats as if from a drum and each of these beats triggers a burst of harmonics that then slowly and quietly decay. In Buddhist thought, such repetitive beats are a call to mindfulness. There is a rustling sound quietly in the background, possibly suggesting gentle rain or someone moving about or the whisper of air.

 

In Courting Dust, rapid, rhythmic, piano-like tinkling sounds cascade hypnotically and suggest a cloud of dust motes in a shaft of sunlight. Each note of the piano sound varies slightly, suggesting a human rather than an electro-mechanical performer, and in the background, the synthesised sound of a choir enriches the sonic weave:

 

sunlight
courting dust
— weightless pirouettes

 

The composition Horizon, at over an hour in length, is a finely nuanced orchestration of sound:

 

eyes closed
reframe
the horizon

 

The idea of such a short poem eliciting an extended piece of music seems ironic, but the listener enters a relaxed state, and their attention might alternate between the theme of the haiku, their breathing and the music’s delightful intricacies.

 

Sean Williams’s Nine Breaths creates a highly original and engaging correspondence between music and text. Each poem and its accompanying composition can induce not only heightened aural awareness, musical pleasure and a meditative or imaginative state but also serious philosophical thought. It’s an exquisite addition to the genre of ambient music.

 

Chris Reid

 

Sean Williams, Nine Breaths (Project Records, 2026), is available on CD or as a download.

More info: theadelaidean.com