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 frogs and birds; airports and airplanes; bustling streets and abandoned warehouses; drawn from India to Ireland and Argentina to Australia.
Sawako
Sounds
When Taylor Deupree invited composer Kenneth Kirschner to contribute to a compilation for his 12k label, Kirschner had the idea to create a song from tracks made by all the other musicians on the record. After he solicited sound files from his fellow artists—usually just a short snippet or two each—he received a CD-R in the mail labeled simply “sawako/sounds/2003.” He put it on and discovered a completely realized, 30-minute, 18-track album. Fascinated, Kirschner began playing it for his friends and passing burned copies along like a rare bootleg. The album was by Sawako, a Japanese sound artist (she preferred “sound sculptor”) who was an integral part of the minimalist scene centered around 12k. Sawako passed away this past March at the age of 45. Upon hearing the news, Kirschner searched for the original audio files from Sawako’s mysterious CD-R on an old hard drive. The files, now more than two decades old, generated nothing but ASCII text. But with a bit of patience, he restored them to their original state for this release. Sounds is a perfect tribute to a singular artist, capturing Sawako’s simple combinations of everyday sounds that, arranged just so, conjure a subtle magic.
Felix Hess
Frogs, a Selection of Field Recordings
The Dutch artist Felix Hess was an accidental Renaissance man, following his muse wherever it led and becoming an expert in multiple fields along the way. After studying physics at university, he became interested in the aerodynamics of boomerangs. While researching boomerangs in Australia, he was overwhelmed by the choruses of bullfrogs that he heard at night. This led him to design small mechanical sound-producing creatures that could respond to one another. Hess presented these in galleries and museums, becoming a renowned installation artist. After seeing an exhibition of Japanese art in one of these museums, he became interested in zenga, or Zen Buddhist painting, and gathered an internationally recognized collection of Zen scrolls (one of which graces this album’s cover). Frogs, a Selection of Field Recordings collects recordings of frogs that were released on cassette in his cult-favorite Frogs series of the 1980s and ‘90s. The calls of these frogs overlap in immensely complex phasing patterns that create strange psychoacoustic effects, more in line with avant-garde sonic art than with your usual nature recording.
boycalledcrow
Kullu
Cassette
“Eventually found a guesthouse. Not very nice: a park-bench bed with two blankets for a mattress, stone walls and a shared squat toilet, but it had an ashram ambience and great acoustics for the guitar. I could really feel those bass notes,” wrote Carl M. Knott in his diary. He was in the Kullu Valley in India in 2006, where he traveled to overcome feelings of stress and anxiety that plagued him. While in India, Knott made friends, played guitar, and recorded the sounds around him. Kullu consists of these recordings chopped up and edited into a beautiful blur; these are proper tunes, with melodies that warp and shift under layers of delay and reverb. But hints of the original recordings persist—we can imagine Knott’s travels through the valley’s towns, across the Beas river, and among the people that helped him find his way.
Natalia Beylis
Lost – For Annie
Cassette
Natalia Beylis has been living in County Leitrim, Ireland for 18 years, and her artistic output during that time has been deeply invested in the landscape. Lost – For Annie investigates the long-term effects that people have had on the land, whether through construction or destruction. The title track takes on commercial farming practices that have cleared large swathes of forest around Beylis’s home. It begins with a recording full of birdsong made before the forest was felled. But something is amiss, as a sampled voice from an educational LP identifies one of the calls: “Blackbird—extreme alarm!” Soon, mechanical clatter interrupts as people arrive to cut the trees and destroy the birds’ habitat. When Beylis returns, we hear only the sounds of her footsteps in a silent field where the forest used to be. The second half of the album is dedicated to the Leitrim Sweathouse Project, which researches stone sweathouses that dot the Irish landscape, where generations ago people would sit in small super-heated spaces similar to saunas to treat illnesses from arthritis to fevers. Interviews with locals, often with sheep bleating in the background, are fascinating as much for their subjects’ personalities as they are for their information about these strange structures. One of these interviewees, searching for a sweathouse she knew in her childhood, perfectly captures the twin themes of the album: “In the 40-odd years that we’ve been gone from there, there’s now forestries where there were never forestries before, the land itself has deteriorated…”
E. Jason Gibbs
Gate
Compact Disc (CD)
Does the observer affect the observed? Does the presence of a field recordist change the outcome of a recording? This a preoccupation of E. Jason Gibbs. “When recording in a natural setting I set my equipment up as quickly and quietly as I can and do my best to camouflage the rig,” he writes. “Once my levels are set I usually walk away from the area, letting it recover from my presence.” On a larger scale, Gibbs is concerned with the relationship between man-made and natural spaces, and how we may unthinkingly carry behaviors fit for the former into the latter. As we encroach into nature so too does our noise—and en masse. The two sides of Gate approach this problem from opposite ends. The title track features sounds from urban spaces including an airport, but underneath the footsteps and the conversations there is an aquatic world that occasionally breaks through, full of crashing waves and crying gulls. On “alter,” the situation is reversed: we are fully submerged off the coast, but with the sounds of thrumming motors and sirens never too far away. Static from Gibbs’s no-input mixer pervades each piece, adding a sense of unease to this ongoing detente between the city and the wilderness.
JP
field research
A lot of noise music expresses the alienation of the modern world through feedback, overloaded electronics, and broken gear. But why not just go straight to the source? This is JP’s proposition with their album field research. “I kept thinking about the amount of physical waste myself and others have damaged the environment with, using equipment to create, explore, and present our findings in sound,” they write. And so they forewent the instruments altogether, using only a cell phone and tape machines to record desolate echoes and clattering metal in abandoned buildings. These empty spaces were often “left in a dangerous state,” and sometimes JP was “harassed or threatened in the process” of recording—a state of affairs that makes field research an effective condemnation of the waste of urban space, and as harrowing an experience as any noise album.
Schweben
Birds
Cassette
With his Schweben project, Philipp Hagers explores his surroundings through musical interventions. 2020’s Trees was an album of drones that asked what an arboreal sense of time might be like. Birds is inspired by avian communication, taking the saxophone as an example of how humans similarly use breath and melody to send messages. Recorded outside with birds singing in the background, it is also an example, perhaps, of intraspecies communication: We can’t know if the birds are responding to Hagers, but he often responds to them. These eight improvisations are an example of a person literally attempting to be in tune with nature, if only for a little while.
Bardol Todol
La Cinta Negra
Compact Disc (CD)
For several years now, strange transmissions have been emanating from Argentina. Their source is Bardo Todol, who relays mysterious messages cloaked in tape warble from his headquarters outside Córdoba. He provides hints as to their contents—“impressionistic sounds of monsters of Magnetophon tapes, plus deformed field recordings, trumpets, clarinets, flutes, shouts, distorted radios, drums, analog and broken synths”—but identifying them is another matter. On La Cinta Negra, we hear wind that may actually be tape hiss, a trumpet that could be a crying child, conversations that may come from people or from a warped VHS. It’s like watching a play through frosted glass: We’re never quite sure what’s happening, but the action is dramatic and surreal enough to keep us in our seats.
Manja Ristić
Ma
The concept of ma in Japanese culture refers to negative space as a positive force: The emptiness that makes substance possible. In painting, this is the blank canvas that surrounds the subject, but in music it is the silence from which sound emerges. Judging from the list of sounds on Manja Ristić’s Ma, there shouldn’t be much empty space to be found: It includes a giant anthill, a cricket chorus, a lake, a river, a boiler, the men’s restroom in a museum, and even the space probe Cassini. Yet somehow, Ristić organizes these disparate sources into two perfectly serene long-form tracks. We start out on Earth with “the ant & the cricket,” an intimate look into the titular insects’ tiny world. Then “full moon trembles on the surface of the creek” takes us into outer space, slowly descending into a burbling underwater world. At first glance, Ma seems the equivalent of a great expanse of white canvas, but closer examination reveals an intricate design of immense complexity.
Mark Behrens
Aiear
Like many people who have tried to record in nature—or simply listen to nature—Mark Behrens found himself interrupted by airplanes. So he decided to embrace these distractions, inviting them into his compositions and making them the center of attention. Aiear (“air” plus “ear”) is the preamble to Behrens’s upcoming Clould (“cloud” plus “could”), which will focus on modern air travel from inside airports and airplanes. But for now, we’re still on the ground, listening to the eerie glissandi of planes taking off and landing from Frankfurt International Airport. Across the piece’s 20 minutes, powerful jet engines are transformed into vaporous, ethereal things, humming along like distant spirits. Behrens is interested in the notion of mythological beings that were once said to exist in the clouds. Aiear reminds us how we now blithely speed through this formerly impossible space, and in doing so remakes an everyday annoyance into a source of wonder.
