The goal of the Best Field Recordings column is to gather the best sounds recorded outside the studio from all around the world. In our first year, we highlighted over 100 albums drawn from dozens of countries representing every continent (and several oceans). It was a daunting task to select only a handful of favorites from this wealth of releases, but hopefully the following list hints at the variety and quality of field recordings to be found on Bandcamp, from an Icelandic volcano to the Brazilian rainforest and from under the Barents Sea to the top of the Swiss Alps.
Philip Jeck & Chris Watson
Oxmardyke
Compact Disc (CD)
Philip Jeck’s passing in March 2022 was an astonishing loss to experimental music, but this collaborative album between Jeck and legendary field recordist Chris Watson is a welcome last statement. Having planned to collaborate with Jeck for years, Watson finally exchanged recordings with him after learning of his condition in the hospital. The files he sent were recorded at the Oxmardyke rail crossing outside of Hull, England, and featured passing freight trains as well as the surrounding countryside. From his hospital bed, Jeck used moments when he felt most comfortable to focus on these tracks, transforming Watson’s crystal-clear recordings into soundscapes that hum and whisper with eerie beauty. According to his partner, Mary Prestidge, “During these brief, intense spells Philip gave all to his ear and heart to guide and shape the music forming at his fingertips.” We’re eternally thankful that he did.
Michael Pisaro-Liu
A room outdoors
Compact Disc (CD)
Wandelweiser composer Michael Pisaro-Liu began integrating field recordings into his work in the mid-2000s; since then, landmark albums like Transparent City, Continuum Unbound, and Nature Denatured and Found Again have blurred the boundaries between silence, found sound, and music. This edition of A room outdoors, his first composition based on field recordings, is an event. Not only does it include the first recordings of the piece, but they are both exceptional, each taking it in distinct and fascinating directions. The score calls for sustaining instruments to be played throughout a 48-minute field recording. The Brussels performance features Guy Vandromme and Adriaan Severins playing keyboard and synthesizer over recordings of a city subway, deftly weaving their instruments through the clatter and clamor to subtly reveal the scene’s hidden musicality. In Cremona, Vandromme plays an Indian harmonium with Luciana Elizondo’s viola da gamba over Fabio Gionfrida’s field recordings, increasing their intensity until they drown out the more rural sounds of birdsong. Then, the instruments recede and the scene has changed to a different place or time of day. Both iterations are played with patience and precision and each one makes a profound statement about how we orient ourselves to our everyday listening environment. It was worth the wait for these definitive recordings of one of Pisaro-Liu’s most important pieces.
Francesco Fabris and Ben Frost
Vakning
Vinyl LP
Even if the listener didn’t know the source of these sounds, Vakning would be a compelling listen full of chaotic noise and intense, thunderous rumbles. The story behind the album elevates it from intriguing to awe-inspiring: Francesco Fabris and Ben Frost each made recordings of the eruption of the Fagradalsfjall volcano outside of Reykjavik, Iceland, in March 2021. What sounds like shattering glass is in fact fragile rock being born from lava, while the echoing, resonant hum is not a synthesizer but the vibration of the ground itself. Vakning is one of the best audio documents of the sublime power of the earth, and all thanks to the fact that two of our greatest field recordists lived near a once-in-a-lifetime seismic event.
CM von Hausswolff & Chandra Shukla
Travelogue [Bali]
Compact Disc (CD)
For the second installment of CM von Hausswolff and Chandra Shukla’s travelogue series, they met in Bali, Indonesia to record for nine days. During this time, they documented key features of Balinese culture, including a gamelan orchestra, a Melukat purification ritual, and a Kecak dance. They then blended, layered, and digitally manipulated their recordings, wrapping them in a dreamlike haze. The result better represents the memory of their travels than the events themselves, with the album’s soft tones and blurred edges inviting the listener to travel through a half-real, half-imagined Bali. You’ll want to take the trip again and again.
Symposium Musicum
Symposium Musicum
Vinyl LP
It’s difficult to determine what Symposium Musicum is, exactly—it’s a field recording, a sociological study, and a musical reinvention—but Marika Smreková and Elia Moretti prefer the term “social sound practice.” The pair, along with artists John-Robin Bold and Anna Khvyl, traveled to a series of villages in eastern Slovakia with significant Romani populations to document the group. Tracks like “In Response” and “Romane Gila” consist of sounds of daily life and interviews with locals, as you would expect. But just as one gets a sense of the terrain, it morphs into something entirely different. The voices of villagers on the opening track “Takt” explode into a kaleidoscope of sound on “Simultan Camps,” and from that moment on the album follows no rules of documentary or even of genre. The pounding beats of “Attention” could belong to a tape from Kampala’s Nyege Nyege, while the icy drones of “Anonymous” might be found on a release from Stockholm’s XKatedral. Yet, enough local flavor remains to situate Symposium Musicum exactly within these Slovakian Romani enclaves, making the album an important and engrossing representation of this misunderstood culture.
Aaron Dilloway
Bhoot Ghar: Sounds of the Kathmandu Horror House
Cassette
One of the most bizarre recordings of the year is this collection of sounds from an amusement park in Kathmandu, Nepal, made by the macabre master of tape manipulation Aaron Dilloway. Though Dilloway seemingly stumbled upon the Kathmandu Fun Park and its haunted house, the place is perfectly tailored to his style. The highlight is the entrance soundtrack of bone-chilling screams blasted through overblown speakers, but the dilapidated rides—including out-of-control bumper cars and a broken ferris wheel—also provide suitable sonic mayhem. These are the cheapest of thrills, full of sound effects that wouldn’t even qualify for a B movie. In other words, it’s pure gold just waiting to be mined by someone like Dilloway.
Andrew Weathers
A Cardinal With a Sign of Blood
Vinyl LP
A Cardinal With a Sign of Blood is one of the most personal and ambitious field recording projects of the year. After the death of his father and his aunt, Andrew Weathers gathered family memorabilia, including old answering machine messages, childhood tapes, and interviews with his grandfather. He processed these with vocoder and Auto-Tune and used them as the basis for slow-moving, elegiac compositions supplemented with field recordings from around the family’s Texas home. The finished pieces are alternately beautiful, sublime, and strange; mundane conversations drift along with dinner parties and tales of UFO sightings, all drenched in nostalgia and melancholy.
Moniek Darge/Vanessa Rossetto
Dream Soundies
Compact Disc (CD)
Two of the most distinctive voices in field recording came together for Dream Soundies and made one of the best records in either of their extensive discographies. Moniek Darge makes faraway sacred spaces sound familiar in her series of “soundies,” while Vanessa Rossetto defamiliarizes even the most mundane sounds, spinning them up into epic narrative soundtracks. For this duo recording, they met in the middle, crafting a surreal “soundie” from Lincoln Center in New York. Real animals growl and crow, toy animals squeak, and people imitate animals; our location shifts from the street to a disco to an underwater world; and throughout, the tinkling chimes of a music box lead us further into the album’s hypnagogic fantasy. Dream Soundies unfurls, appropriately enough, with the tenuous logic of a dream—one that demands and resists interpretation in equal measure.
Jana Winderen
The Blue Beyond
Vinyl LP
Jana Winderen’s subaquatic field recordings have already produced several classics in the genre, and The Blue Beyond adds to her impressive discography. Comprising two pieces commissioned for Art Basel events in Basel, Switzerland, and Miami, Florida, it features animal sounds taken from site-specific locations in the Alps and the Atlantic Ocean. “Du Petit Risoud aux Profondeurs du Lac de Joux” begins on land with sounds captured in the Risoud forest before submerging into the Lac de Joux, where we hear strange insects along with the rumbling of a boat engine. “The Art of Listening: Under Water” combines recordings from the Atlantic, the Barents Sea, and several tropical oceans. Amid the crackling of tiny sea creatures is a persistent buzzing like an EBow on a guitar—evidence of man-made mechanical interference. The Blue Beyond provides a startling glimpse into environments that none of us are likely to visit, but where humans nonetheless have an outsized impact.
Lucie Páchová
Крънджилица
Cassette
Крънджилица is quickly becoming an artifact of the past. Lucie Páchová came across the town of Krandzhilitsa, Bulgaria, on a hiking trek meant to take her through villages that have an official population of zero. Krandzhilitsa is not yet such a village—it has a population between three and ten—but it is dying quickly. Крънджилица documents its citizens’ daily life as they choose to remain in the mountains even as the urban centers in the valley claim more and more of the rural population. Domestic sounds—preparing food, caring for goats, static from the radio—are interspersed with Páchová’s haunting prepared zither and interviews with villagers (“Everyone has gone,” says one). It’s only a matter of time before Krandzhilitsa joins the surrounding towns in their desertion, but Páchová celebrates the resilience of those keeping it alive, creating one of the year’s most vital recordings in the process.
Philip Samartzis
Atmospheres and Disturbances
Compact Disc (CD)
Philip Samartzis is renowned for recording extreme environments, and Atmospheres and Disturbances is a case in point: he spent a month at the High-Altitude Research Station in the Swiss Alps to track how climate change has affected conditions there. He gets up close to the trickle of a melting glacier and zooms out to capture a violent windstorm; he records the buzz and hum of the scientific station and the bustle of the train platforms that bring tourists into the region. At times these recordings are deceptively peaceful, but the sudden crack of a calving glacier or drum of hail on tin reminds us of the danger that Samartzis faced to bring us this immersive experience of an environment balancing on the edge of destruction.
Ahti & Ahti
Nokivesi
Vinyl LP
Marja Ahti and Niko-Matti Ahti have each been featured in the column this year for their respective solo recordings, and this collaborative effort combines their strengths. Nokivesi centers around the story of a man living alone on an island, an elderly couple gossiping about his way of life. “I guess he wanted to live that way,” a man says in Finnish. “I don’t know how he got to that island, since he was there all alone and didn’t have a boat or anything.” As the recording continues, the stories get more outlandish: he would wade ashore, but only for “soot-water,” or coffee; he lived off gull and crow eggs; he removed his own tonsils on a cutting board used for fish. Ahti and Ahti’s field recordings soundtrack the couple’s dialogue as well as the man’s escapades, allowing us to imagine the hardships of his life and the comforts of those who speculate about him. There is no moral here, only questions: What is society’s responsibility to the individual, and vice versa? It’s a portrait presented obliquely, leaving us to ponder this mysterious man’s motives just like our narrators.
