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 recordings from a Czech coal mine to a Thai temple; from the Big Island of Hawai‘i to the port of Madeira; from the streets of New York City to the mountains of northern Norway.
Viv Corringham
Soundwalkscapes
Compact Disc (CD)
Since the late 1970s, Viv Corringham has practiced as a sound artist and vocal improviser, often centering her pieces around walking. She had a radio show at Resonance FM entitled Vocal Strolls and has long undertaken a series of Shadow-walks, which are inspired by walks that have been important in other people’s lives. For Soundwalkscapes, Corringham decided to take a walk on the first Monday of every month in 2023, no matter where she was. The six selections here find her in New York state and London. As she strolls, she improvises: she sings, hums, counts and narrates. Over the course of the album, the histories of these places are revealed along with their present state. “Nearly 200 years ago, Central Park’s landscape near the west 85th street entrance was home to Seneca Village, a community of predominantly free African American property owners,” she tells us. Elsewhere, she reads a sign: “Notice: 24-hour video surveillance. Residents and guests only.” Corringham, a teacher of Deep Listening, is always present and engaged with her surroundings, responsive to the rich sonic environment around her. She’s a phenomenal tour guide and an engaging companion, wherever she takes you.
Stanislav Abrahám
Důl Lazy
Compact Disc (CD)
Důl Lazy is a selection taken from eight hours of recordings of the Lazy coal mine in Orlová, Czech Republic. The coal industry that propelled Orlová into modernity in the early 20th century later undermined it, quite literally—in the ‘60s, the structural damage caused by mining was such that the complete demolition of the town was considered. Orlová survived at the cost of its schools, its railway station, and hundreds of buildings, but kept the mines open. Finally, even the mine closed in 2019. In Orlová, a town where the population is shrinking and unemployment is rising, the loss of the mine is one more step toward obsolescence; it has been ranked the worst place to live in the country. Originally recorded in 2010 for a planned (but never completed) installation in Prague’s National Technical Museum, Důl Lazy is now a document of a bygone era. We hear the miners talking in their Ostrava dialect and the heavy machinery grinding away at the earth, sounds of the industry that kept Orlová alive even as it was slowly killing it.
Mirt • Ter
Phra Maha Chedi Tripob Trimongkol
Phra Maha Chedi Tripob Trimongkol is a chedi, or Thai Buddhist shrine, located outside Hat Yai, Thailand. The structure is made entirely of circular stainless steel tubing, creating a gleaming pagoda atop a hill overlooking the city. Polish duo Tomek Mirt and Magda Ter recorded there twice, once in 2022 and again this past February, to capture a unique attribute: the temple is covered in small bells that jingle and chime with the wind. The first track captures this phenomenon in a pristine, tranquil recording, while the second is more dynamic, featuring Buddhist chanting and the comings and goings of tourists. Phra Maha Chedi Tripob Trimongkol is a vivid snapshot of an utterly unique place, the next best thing to meditating in the temple itself.
Ryan Marino
The Evidences
Cassette
The Evidences consists of nine untitled, abstract pieces, as sparse and unforgiving as the album’s black and white cover. Filmmaker and sound artist Ryan Marino recorded “amid the lush flora and hostile terrain” of the island of Hawai‘i and then subtly manipulated the results with tape loops. What we hear is a far cry from the popular imagination of the Big Island. Identifiable sounds include wind and waves and footsteps, the noisy, uncontrollable excesses that are edited out of most field recordings. But diving further into these gray monoliths of static reveals a certain peaceful and meditative hum. The Hawai‘i figured here is a harsh and desolate place, but with patience it reveals its uncompromising beauty.
John Young
Espaces lointains
“Daddy, did you notice any sort of…sound when you were down there?” asks a little girl at the beginning of “Hidden Spaces.” It seems that all John Young does is notice sound, and in the most unexpected places. The aforementioned track combines field recordings from Lake Åsunden in Sweden, an escalator in Montréal, and a pig sty in Dobbiaco, Italy. “Arioso” is based around recordings of crickets and pedestrian crossing signals in Oberlin, Ohio, while “Sweet Anticipation” captures street preachers in New York City. It doesn’t matter so much where Young finds his sounds, though, as he builds alien digital worlds around them anyway. Identifiable sources are quick to fade away into an electronic tableau only to suddenly reappear, creating an engrossing tension between the familiar and the strange.
Alessandro Ragazzo
La devizione del profilo
Compact Disc (CD)
For Alessandro Ragazzo, a field recording is only a beginning, a jumping-off point on which he builds walls of noise. By the end of each track, any trace of a real landscape is obliterated in favor of shuddering drones and blasting synths. Case in point: “Status” begins innocently enough, with sounds of playing children, but soon morphs into something else entirely. Voices start repeating, as if they have become unstuck from time, then are subsumed in prickly static and harsh feedback. Again and again throughout La devizione del profilo, recordings reappear only to be transformed anew in a brutal but hypnotizing cycle.
Seth Nehil & Bruno Duplant
(else)where
Compact Disc (CD)
(else)where is all about juxtaposition. Seth Nehil and Bruno Duplant combine recordings from the Pacific Northwest and northern France, which are accompanied by paired photographs by Harrison Higgs and TJ Norris. By shuffling through the photographs while listening to the album, the listener can create further couplings of sound and image. The tracks themselves juxtapose sound and music, as half-heard melodies drift through the background of crystal-clear field recordings. A gorgeously subtle album, (else)where invites repeat plays to parse its delicate layers of instruments, voices, electronics, and environmental sound.
Various Artists
Meteorologia
Meteorologia is an album-length disquisition on the pleasures of sitting and looking at the weather. Meditations on wind, rain, and snow unite field recordists who are otherwise quite distant from one another—C. Claire Dullac in a Czech forest, Emmanuel Mieville on a Portuguese island, Steve Peters in the New Mexico desert. Dullac records a frozen lake, Mieville records a busy port, and Peters records his friends describing the scene outside the Santa Fe Art Institute. These are joined by compositions inspired by wind and rain by Tiago Sousa, Carlos Santos, and Janek Schaefer. Meteorologia is not about dramatic events like storms or floods, but rather the everyday weather that is so easy to ignore. These artists remind us that we lose out on a crucial aspect of life by doing so. As they quote from the great German writer W.G. Sebald: “Meteorology is not superfluous to the story. Don’t have an aversion to noticing the weather.”
Andrea Ermke
Walks
Cassette
Andrea Ermke is known for live-mixing field recordings from mini-disc in bands like Sink and Tree with the Necks’s Chris Abrahams. She is also a prominent part of Berlin’s eichtzeit scene of experimental musicians along with Annette Krebs, Ignaz Schick, and many others. Walks is Ermke’s first solo album, though as an inveterate collaborator she gives Andrew Lafkas (producer) and Bryan Eubanks (mastering) equal credit. Drawing from over 20 years of recordings, Ermke mixes and matches sounds in real time (or eichtzeit). Combining pieces from such a large collection leads to some illuminating moments in these two long tracks, like the echoing resonance of a train station that develops seamlessly into a walk through a bird-filled forest. Walks is simultaneously light and dense, a nimble improvisation that hints at the depths of a vast archive.
Angus Carlyle
Powerlines
Compact Disc (CD)
As part of the Arctic Auditories team, Angus Carlyle is tasked with complexifying existing maps of the High North with aural data; i.e., to create a map of how Norway sounds rather than how it looks. On the ground, he discovered something far different from the wind-swept snowscapes we might imagine. Inspired by an offhand comment about the “electrical sounds of the countryside,” Carlyle braved the elements to make electro-magnetic recordings of power lines stretched across the northern countryside. Across an hour-long track, we travel with him as he leaves his colleagues, gathers the sounds of buzzing, staticky electricity, is interrupted by hiking Norwegians, and makes his way back through the frozen landscape. It’s a fascinating trek and a brilliant portrayal of the dynamic sounds that betray the liveliness of this icy region.
