Bandcamp hosts an amazing array of field recordings from around the world, made by musicians and sound artists as well as professional field recordists. In this column, we highlight the best sounds recorded outside the studio and released in the last month. This installment features soundwalks through London, England and Asheville, North Carolina; aquatic worlds from Okinawa, Japan and Lisbon, Portugal; and airplanes from the perspective of a passenger and of an ant.
Patricia Wolf
The Secret Lives of Birds
Cassette
Birdwatching and field recording are naturally aligned. Many natural soundscapes feature at least one bird call, and the dawn chorus that begins each day with birdsong is a popular theme for beginners and professionals alike. Patricia Wolf became an avid birder through the production of stellar albums like Life on Smoking Mountain and See-Through. The Secret Lives of Birds combines Wolf’s instantly recognizable ambient electronics with some of her most memorable encounters with birds. At times, she simply evokes the imagery of wildlife through her synths, as in the swooping arabesques of “Starling Murmuration.” But just as often she collaborates with the birds themselves, adding complementary tracks to unedited field recordings on songs like “Rufous Hummingbird Dive Display.” Wolf becomes an eager and knowledgeable nature guide through these musical additions, translating the excitement and beauty of each avian event into arrestingly dynamic miniatures.
Marc Behrens
Clould
Compact Disc (CD)
To travel by air is to enter a world of worry and waiting; basically, we’ve taken the miracle of flight and made it a hassle. Marc Behrens attempts to regain some of the wonder and awe of taking to the skies with Clould, whose title—a combination of “cloud” and “could”—refers to the possibilities inherent in flying. Over the course of 36 flights, Behrens recorded inside airports and airplanes in any way he could: with microphones in his luggage, with electromagnetic mics, with a recorder plugged into the in-flight entertainment system. After years of collecting this material, he organized it into a suite of five movements. Safety demonstrations and PA announcements are stretched and compressed until digital interference appears, making flat robotic voices sound even more inhuman. However, it’s hard not to see oneself in their stretched and blurred syllables, which seem to reenact the uncanny temporality of an interminable layover. As Behrens suggests, there may even be something spiritual in trying to decode these messages, completely forgettable in their origins but now made alien and ghostly.
Olli Aarni
Muurahaisia ja lentokone
At the beginning of the pandemic in spring 2020, Olli Aarni recorded an ant trail in Sipoonkorpi National Park in Finland. While he was recording, an airplane—likely mostly empty—flew overhead. Years later, after reading the philosopher Timothy Morton’s bookDark Ecology, that moment took on new resonance. Put simply, Morton argues that humans are not separate from what we call “nature,” but that we are inextricably bound up with it. With Muurahaisia ja lentokone, Aarni asks, “Is that airplane a thing of nature?” Most field recordists would class its flight as an interruption, an intrusion into an otherwise pristine recording of a specific natural habitat. But Aarni lets his frame expand to include the airplane and the ants at once, insisting that they represent different elements of the same picture. You don’t need the philosophy to enjoy the recording, though. “The innumerable individual steps of an ant build a textural web of sound, where it is impossible to distinguish a single rattling from the mass,” Aarni writes. “The effect is closer to the flow of water, rain, the crackle of fire and the rubbing of branches in the wind.” Across seven iterations, he expertly edits and treats the recording to emphasize different aspects of the rustling world of the ants and bass-y drone of the plane, joining insect and human in a single immersive work of art.
Kate Carr
Midsummer, London
Compact Disc (CD)
On June 21, 2023—the longest day of the year—Kate Carr traversed her adopted home of London from west to east, from Loughborough Junction to Slade Green, along the Thames. Throughout the trip, she recorded a “sonic transect” of the city, documenting the sounds of summer in the world capital. Midsummer, London is an excerpted diary of her excursion that features the most memorable moments joined together by a gently radiant electronic background. Song titles wittily describe Carr’s progress: “I met a dog in Hampton who lived on a boat near a gravel recycling plant,” or “A rather wistful stop for noodles (and why is someone singing in this food court anyway?).” The sounds of trash bins being emptied sit alongside a church service at St. Paul’s Cathedral in a series of dreamlike vignettes. Listening to the album is like traveling in a daze through London, seeing the city through heat mirages that make each encounter unpredictable and strange.
nula.cc
Every Forever Is Written In Rust
For decades, Lloyd Dunn was a prankster and provocateur. His band The Tape-beatles used a method they called Plagiarism®, illegally sampling radio ads, audiobooks, and world-famous artists (among them, of course, the Beatles) to satirize American mass media. More recently, Dunn has turned to natural sound sources for his nula.cc project. Here, Dunn is interested in stillness and motion, either creating great blocks of static ambience or onward-rushing blurs of noise. Every Forever Is Written In Rust combines both, being simultaneously about stasis and movement. “[T]he charge of ourselves passes over the landscape like tinned ghosts, touching nothing, while the land unscrolls beneath us. Yet the overwhelming sensation is that we are motionless, spectators within an enveloping projection,” he writes. These four long tracks are full of forward momentum while remaining perfectly calm, recreating the feeling of sitting still on a bus as the landscape speeds by. All you have to do as the passenger is listen and let the world reveal itself in gorgeous, painterly detail.
Bryn Davis
Virginia Bluebells
Cassette
Bryn Davis makes what they call “field recording music,” a seemingly simple term that in practice appears to be infinitely flexible. On Virginia Bluebells, they take recordings from an audio diary and transform them into musique concrète compositions that verge into several different genres. Some examples: The bird song on “September Rain” stops and starts like the scratching of a vinyl DJ; the street sounds of “64 ans c’est mort” are diced up into a complex IDM rhythm; the Paris paving crew on “glou glou” gradually morphs into a dissonant drone. You never know where any sound will take you moment by moment, but neither do they lose their identity as real in-the-world sonic phenomena. The name of this album is taken from the Virginia Bluebell flower, which blooms early in spring before going dormant for the season to store up strength for next year’s display. In the same way, Davis has been patiently collecting these recordings for this exuberant release, a riotous show of color drawn from the soil of everyday life.
hhvm
不自然
On July 21, 2000, Bill Clinton visited Okinawa, Japan—the first U.S. president to do so in 40 years. He apologized for the massive role that the U.S. military played in the daily lives of its inhabitants, saying that “I know the people of Okinawa did not ask to play this role—hosting more than 50% of America’s forces in Japan on less than 1% of Japan’s land mass.” He then made a promise: “We will keep all our commitments, and we will continue to do what we can to reduce our footprint on this island. We take seriously our responsibility to be good neighbors, and it is unacceptable to the United States when we do not meet that responsibility.” Twenty-four years later, the Futenma Marine Corps base is still there. After speaking with a friend who must drive around the base every day to get to work, hhvm decided to make an album imagining what the island would be like without it. 不自然 was recorded in the seas and rivers of Okinawa, and its aquatic sounds and instrumental flourishes invoke a pastoral idyll where one could move freely from beach to beach, sea to sea. “That’s what I talk about with my friend,” hhvm writes. “But neither of us really believes that the bases will disappear. There are few people who know what it would be like without the base, and those who do are growing older and disappearing every year.”
R. Pierre
Qanat
Compact Disc (CD)
Qanats are irrigation systems developed in the Persian Empire over 3,000 years ago. They consist of tunnels that bring water to the surface from underground sources via incredibly gradual inclines over long distances. But though they are ancient in design, they can teach us important lessons as water scarcity worsens in the 21st century. Qanats require careful planning, maintenance, and community organization based on local traditional knowledge passed down through generations—a useful model for sustainable development. On this album, artist Caleb Dravier takes us into a qanat with his R. Pierre moniker. Across four tracks, we get a tour of one of these fascinating structures, from “Access Shaft” to “Bedrock,” “Water Channel” to “Outlet.” We hear the hollow ambience of the well, the weird echoes of the tunnel, and the low purling of the water. Qanat is an album of spooky atmospherics, but more than that, it’s a work of urgent sonic archeology, a sign from the past about how we should approach the future.
Glauco Salvo
Field Studies Vol. 7: Sounds from the River Tejo
Cassette
Glauco Salvo’s excellent Field Studies series continues with its seventh volume, Sounds from the River Tejo. During a four-month residency at Zaratan Arte Contemporânea, Salvo recorded sounds from around the River Tejo (or Tagus) between Lisbon and Barreira, Portugal. Recordings from the dock at the Bom Sucesso Marina, from the south station of the Telecabine Lisboa gondola, from the Rio Tejo lookout, and from the Caldeira Grande are treated with tape machines, distortion pedals, and electronic sounds generated with a modular synthesizer built during the residency. But none of these artificial manipulations overwhelm the natural sounds of the river and its wildlife; instead, Salvo creates a delicate balance between his surroundings and his electronic accents. The result is as calming as it is engaging, with the sounds of the Tagus being buoyed up by graceful, subtle melodies.
Andrew Weathers
AW Walks to the West Bank of the French Broad Every Day
Compact Disc (CD)
Sharp-eyed residents of Asheville, North Carolina may have noticed a strange man walking to and from the French Broad River, microphones attached to his hat bill, muttering to himself. This was simply field recordist Andrew Weathers during his residency at Drop of Sun Studios. Every day he would sojourn to the bank of the French Broad listening to “tunes about rivers and loss” through headphones, singing and mumbling along. He then layered these walks on top of one another, synced to the moment he stepped out onto the street. The product forms “Exterior,” an eerie exploration of solitude. Weathers could not hear the sounds that were being recorded through the mics on his cap, and we cannot hear the songs that he heard. His voice is thus constantly at the edge of perception, always about to be overwhelmed by the lively cityscape that he is moving through. But Weathers has powerful allies: Will Oldham’s old piano, an urgently clanging bell, and a menacing hum all support him on his lonely path by adding a dissonant touch to his travels. In the end, a persistent metallic thrumming drowns out every mundane sound in a temporary victory for the melancholy.
