About Us
Sending signals across the waves
Beginnings
The weekend of June 2nd, 2017, Brett McKinney and I were hanging out at a blokes weekend on the Bellarine Peninsula. By “blokes weekend”, I mean über-nerds weekend: board-games, card-games and dice-games galore, for three solid days. Heaven.
But despite the gaming focus of the weekend, Brett and I had brought our axes down with us: Brett with his electric guitar and amp and me with my iPad, Garage Band and portable speaker. My brother Pete who was hosting the weekend had the idea that the weekend wasn’t so much a “gaming” weekend as much as it was an “escape” weekend — to escape your daily duties and responsibilities for a brief couple of days to do “whatever”.
That weekend Brett and I jammed together for the first time, and out of nowhere ended up recording our first track. But after the weekend ended, we went back to our busy lives. And the music that we recorded was put on ice.
Round Two
Twelve months later we both attended what would be the second great “Escapefest” weekend away. This time in anticipation, Brett brought not only his axe, but everything he needed to record and mix whatever we jammed out. It didn’t look like much, but it worked:
While everyone else was busy gaming, Brett and I locked ourselves away for hours, developing, expanding on, and evolving a song idea that I had brought just for the occasion. That was the beginning the track “Correspondence”.
Via Correspondence
Ever since, Brett and I have been writing music together, with the expectation that there are no expectations: no due dates, no set number of tracks, no rush. Just writing music for the joy of writing.
But writing music collaboratively when you live in opposite parts of Victoria is a challenge. Enter, the internet: I write a drum track and bass line and send it to Brett, then Brett slaps a tasty guitar lick on top and sends it back, and so on, and so on. Every one of our tracks is pieced together, riff-by-riff, beat-by-beat, via correspondence.
By Sea
Two-and-a-half years on and our lives, families and jobs have moved us further apart, each of us now on opposite sides of Port Phillip Bay. But distance aside, we’re still able to collaborate through the magic of the web.
More recently, we decided it was high time that we push our tunes out into the big wide world to fend for themselves; a terrifying but necessary step for any creative process. But to do so required that we give ourselves, our band, a name.
By Sea — it’s how we communicate, collaborate and craft our sound. Our melodies and harmonies, all digitised and packaged, sent over the waves, digital and physical, across the bay, to find their next iteration.
— D