A duet with Croatia’s sea organ

The sea organ in Zadar, Croatia, is one of the sonic seven wonders of the world as far as field recordists are concerned – a musical instrument created by an architect as part of the sea wall, that’s played by the waves and affected by the weather, the tides, the time and so on.

Russ Wainwright spent some time in Zadar and sent us this recording of the sea organ in action on a warm autumn afternoon – a spectacular, natural piece of music performed by the sea. Below is an interesting image (in Croatian only, unfortunately!) demonstrating how the organ works.

For the reimagined version, we’ve tried to set up a kind of duet improvised performance with the sea organ, setting up the types of layered effects that respond to the sound that’s being fed through them dynamically, just as the sea organ itself reacts dynamically to the waves passing through it.

As such, the waves pass through the organ, and the organ passes through our own ‘effects organ’, resulting in the memory version below.

City version:

Memory version: