SHHE (Su Shaw) releases her new album ‘THALASSA’
‘THALASSA’ takes its name from the primordial Greek sea goddess, the personification of the sea itself, and unfolds as a sonic dive from submergence to emergence. Journeying through six stages of descent and ascent, the album is built around breath and transformation, drawing on Shaw’s time spent in Alexandria, Egypt, where she was “Musician in Residence” at B’sarya, a project supported by British Council in 2022. Originally commissioned to record the Mediterranean using hydrophones, Shaw found herself unable to capture the sea directly; Alexandria’s heavily militarised coastline prohibited sound recording, above and below the surface. ‘THALASSA’ is an attempt to give voice to a momentous sea that is often rendered silent, or actively silenced.
Shaw tells us, “Alexandria is fascinating. It’s a city that is fated to be underwater – the city has already sunk twice – and by 2050, it’s predicted that a third of Alexandria will be underwater or uninhabitable. I’ve lived my whole life in Scotland on the opposite banks of the same estuary – where the River Tay meets the North Sea. The project was an opportunity to research commonalities between both Alexandria and my home city of Dundee – where it’s also predicted that parts will be underwater in my lifetime. I began to explore our personal relationship with water; how we respond to change, to emergency, to crisis, to loss, how we accept that our existence is entirely dependent on and at the mercy of the sea.” These mirrored futures form the emotional and conceptual core of the record, prompting a wider reflection on how we respond to impending ecological disaster.
In recent years, the Mediterranean has experienced extreme marine heatwaves, with temperatures reaching 30.7°C off the coast of Corsica and rising to six degrees above average in some regions. It is also one of the most polluted seas in the world, with an estimated 1.17 million tonnes of plastic already present, and over 229,000 tonnes added every year. These pressures sit beneath the surface of ‘THALASSA’, informing its tension between stillness and urgency.
The album was recorded entirely using a custom-built modular synthesiser, designed by SHHE, and developed over two years with Scotland-based electronic producer Ben Chatwin. Designed to welcome randomness and instability, the modular generates unpredictable voltages that act as co-composers, embracing chaos as a fundamental creative force. Shaw’s voice sits at the album’s centre; stretched, fractured. “My experience in Egypt wasn’t possible to verbalise,” she continues, “and while voice features heavily, it acts like more of an extension, in lieu of language; manipulated, skewed, and in some tracks, processed beyond recognition.”
For the first time in her career, Shaw’s work will be pressed in Scotland, in partnership with Seabass, a vinyl pressing plant with the ambition to become the most sustainable in the world. The decision to manufacture ‘THALASSA’ locally was an intentional extension of the album’s concerns, aligning its physical production with its wider reflections on pollution, extractivism, and environmental impact. This collaboration acknowledges the material realities of music-making, foregrounding questions of resource use and responsibility at a moment when the ecological cost of cultural production is increasingly impossible to ignore.
Three years in development, ‘THALASSA’ is challenging, drawing attention to the complex hydro-political situation that encompasses not only the coastlines of Egypt, but across the wider MENA region. During research for the album, Shaw also became interested in freediving and incorporating foundational breathing techniques into the recording process. Breath becomes both subject and method; a means of physical boundary-pushing, and a metaphor for survival above and below the surface.
Since her 2019 debut album, SHHE has developed a catalogue rooted in long-term, site-responsive research, using sound as a means to explore how water is controlled, restricted, polluted, and weaponised across different geopolitical contexts.
Her projects have included sonic documentation of Dokan Dam in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, one of the country’s largest hydroelectric power plants, where she charted forty years of water flow using sonification to signify periods of flood and drought; recordings made along the banks of the Guaíba in Porto Alegre, Brazil, amidst catastrophic flooding in 2024; work with the frozen Northern Dvina River in Russia’s main seaport, Arkhangelsk; hydrophone recordings on the Atlantic seabed in St Malo, home to the largest tidal range in Europe; and a residency at Cove Park on Scotland’s west coast, neighbouring the UK’s Trident nuclear submarine base.
Across these projects, SHHE’s approach is defined by an attention to listening, often allowing silence, restriction, and unpredictability to become compositional forces. ‘THALASSA’ draws these threads together, reflecting a sustained inquiry into our dependency on water, the fragility of ecosystems under pressure, and the uneven power structures that govern access to essential resources.
The album’s visual world expands through collaborations with Egyptian audiovisual artist Nurah Farahat, and Alexandria-born artist Aya Tarek, whose album artwork reflects what she describes as “the mind of the sea, endless, reflective, aware of its own profound depth.” ‘THALASSA’ is mastered by Heba Kadry, who was also born and raised in Egypt, now residing in Brooklyn, NY.
Balancing introspection with political urgency, ‘THALASSA’ is an immersive body of work, one that listens closely, and asks how we might learn to do the same.
Artwork credit: Aya Tarek
Photo credit: Zac Mahrouche
Tracklist
- Pneuma
- Katávasi
- Allásso
- Emfánisi
- Peras
- Anodos