Half Mile Down (feat. Slaughter Beach, Dog)

by Delmer Darion

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about

In Autumn 1932, American naturalist William Beebe and engineer Otis Barton were sealed into a bathysphere – a submersible metal sphere lowered into the ocean on a long cable – and dove deeper than any human had been before, a half mile under the waves. With the hope of documenting new aquatic life and terrain, the deep-sea explorers stared through thick quartz windows into the gloomy depths hued with purple light. They sank past heaths of mottled anemones, by gulper eels, sea snails, giant dragonfish and toothy-jawed anglers, as the water exploded into firework displays of bioluminescent fish, and the endless black gulf shattered, boiling with the light of new worlds observed for the first time.

The accounts of Beebe and Barton – translated by Else Bostelmann into wondrous paintings for the National Geographic – provide the story for Delmer Darion’s new single ‘Half Mile Down’, featuring Slaughter Beach, Dog (Modern Baseball’s Jake Ewald).

The track itself marks a steep departure from the expansive songwriting favoured across Delmer Darion’s debut album Morning Pageants, but clasps to the same clandestine curiosity. Its brittle and sparsely percussive electronics billow with rippling strings and buoyant synths, while Slaughter Beach, Dog’s vocal cracks through them with a dread and wonder that makes three thousand leagues under the sea feel both the warmest and coldest place on earth. The final line is taken from Langdon Smith’s fanciful love poem ‘Evolution’, where the depths reached educe a primordial memory, their thoughts turning inwards to relationships on land.

lyrics

We lay back on steel bolts
And curled in a cold bed.
The vessel, a hollow pea;
The cable, a cobweb.

Then we struck the surface and fell through to the sea.

We sunk past the jet black blobs
Of ascidians and pearl shells;
Through the forever blue,
The searchlight fell

Like long vanished sunlight remembered through the house.

I pressed up to the clear quartz
And looked down to
The black pit mouth of death itself
Yet still washed in blue,

And I looked up and remembered the anemones’ purple hue.

Down here in outer space,
A fall from a cliff
Is a gentle drifting downward
To some memory of if

You were a tadpole and I was a fish.

credits

released May 17, 2023

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about

Delmer Darion UK

Delmer Darion are an experimental electronic producer duo based in London. Their new album, Tall Vision-of-the-Voyage is due 15th September on Practise Music.

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