❄️ ★ ❄️ ★ ❄️ ★ ❄️★ ❄️ ★ ❄️ ★ ❄️★ ❄️ ★ ❄️ ★ ❄️
Genres: Ambient, Electronic, Environmental
RIYL: Brian Eno, Goldmund, Robert Rich, Steve Roach, Patrick O’Hearn

In February 2017, theAdelaidean travelled on an Australian Antarctic Division Arts Fellowship to Casey Research Station, four thousand kilometres south of Perth, Australia. There, he engaged with the people and places that make the Far South one of the most unique environments on Earth. Under his real name (writer Sean Williams), he responded in words to the intense emotional, physical and spiritual experiences gained there. 
 
With HYPERAUREA he reaches beyond words to expand on those accounts. Using ambient sounds – piano, drones, and textures evoking weather and human activities – theAdelaidean evokes the timeless, dreamlike nature of life and death on the ice.
 
Across almost four hours, HYPERAUREA charts a course through the ice, sky, water, weather and rock of a precious and hostile landscape that few people ever visit. Antarctica is a vast source of creativity, where the visual palette is naturally limited to whites, blacks and blues: colours that this musical tribute evokes through a similarly spare assemblage of sound. 
 
HYPERAUREA is broken into three expansive chapters: Echoes of Antarctica, Ghosts of the Ice, and Southern Stars. Each musical exploration maps its own response to different aspects of the last frontier on Earth: human and non-human phenomena; a pervasive sense of transience and mortality; and the constellations that unite the continent under a single, infinite sky.
 
At times warm and human, at other times angular and alien, HYPERAUREA responds: through pulsing, layered chords to slow seasonal change in a land where there are no trees or flowers; to the confines of an outpost surrounded by vast tracks of nature rarely seen by human eyes by subtle inversions and reversals in pitch and tone; to rhythms of station life that can be thrown at any moment into chaos by weather; to the extremes of endless day and endless night swept by freezing winds over ice that never melts; and to the haunted memories of those who came before. Half-glimpsed melodies and motifs emerge from and fade back into harmonies and soundscapes that are themselves elusive, creating a lingering account of theAdelaidean’s voyage through a land that exists in a precarious relationship with people—who have walked its changing vistas for barely a century and even from afar, through global climate change, threaten its existence. 
  
As explained in more detail in the accompanying 23-page booklet, which includes photos taken during theAdelaidean’s expedition, the word “hyper-aurea” means “beyond south”, hinting at spaces over the lip of the conventional world. This is the soundtrack of theAdelaidean’s exploration of those spaces.

ARTIST BIO:

For forty years, as theAdelaidean and under his own name, bestselling author Sean Williams has undertaken deeply personal aural explorations that, following the great spiral of life, draw heavily on sources and techniques that inspired him in his youth. Alongside his 10 albums for Projekt Records, he composed original music for the multi-artform dance work Bárbaros which debuted in 2023 as part of the Adelaide Festival Centre’s 50th anniversary program.