How much do we actually listen to the world around us? It’s a thought that’s been rattling around in my head every since I took up an interest in field recording a few years ago. At the time I’d been experiencing a musical obsession with Cassandra Jenkins’ excellent song The Ramble, which (spoiler alert) happens to be final song on this week’s postcard. Cassandra had written it during the early days of the pandemic when she’d take daily walks to the aforementioned spot in Central Park to bird watch. Inspired by the words of Janet Cardiff, she crafted a song using recordings that she’d taken during these visits that aimed to take the listener on a walk with her, through both the sonic and emotional space that she was in at the time:
“…I want there to be a moment for you to find peace and tranquility in a world of chaos. It is still there, and it’s okay for you to take that for yourself. Not only can we find that peace within ourselves, but we can find beauty in it and admire our surroundings. We can still appreciate everything we’re given, even in a total crisis. The Ramble was a place for me where I’d find that every day.” - Cassandra Jenkins
The end result is a beautiful piece of music that I feel fully achieves her goals; listening to it with headphones on and eyes closed, you really do feel like you are moving through a physical space, experiencing new sonic joys at every turn. Sprinklers, footsteps, birds, passersby. But for me, the song also marked a transformation in how much I was paying awareness to the world of sound in my day to day life. You know that internet phrase “what has been seen cannot be unseen”? Once I’d started to realise how much sound there is in the world around us and how little of it I actually listen to, it could no longer be ignored.
This is something I try to actively explore now through field recording, which has become an excellent ‘old man’ hobby for me ahead of my time. If you’ve not tried it before, I can highly recommend it. There are two common responses; first, people seem to be mind blown by the level of detail you can hear when you have headphones on and the kit is on and whirring; it does feel like an entirely different world that we miss out on when busying about with normal life. And secondly, they ask me “what are you going to do with the recordings?”. Frankly, I don’t know! To me, it’s not necessarily the point; I feel that the act is listening in and of itself is very important (although I do really like sonic postcards of specific times and places. We take photos of places we visit to remember them; why not take sound snapshots too?).
That being said, recently I’ve been fortunate enough to been involved in a project that has made very good use of some recordings that I made with my friend Fiona (featured above in my terrible photograph) whilst on the Isle of Wight last year. Fiona and the field recordist/artist Pablo Diserens put together an open call with TBA-21 Academy’s Ocean-Archive, requesting folks send in field recordings of water to create a piece of communal art. Pablo ended up stitching together recordings from 35 collaborators around the world into a sonic patchwork of watery biomes, taking the listener on a journey through rivers, seas, pipe networks and ponds. The finished piece is available to listen to on bandcamp, and recently was featured in their best field recordings of January (!!!) which is very cool. Obviously I’m biased, but I can strong recommend giving up some time to give it a listen.
You can find your latest postcard below, which (unsurprisingly) features a bunch of tracks that include field recordings in different formats. Some are very clearly focussed around these recordings, either structurally or philosphically, whilst others have them almost as an easter egg, with just a snippet here and there to augment the song. ‘Metal Bird’ by Gold Panda is a bit of both. After carrying out a trip to Japan to capture field recordings for a documentary, he was inspired to create an album (the excellent Good Luck and Do Your Best) about his experience of his time there using entirely new music. One field recording remains though - the distorted stutter at the beginning of the track that’s chopped to underpin and drive the song is a recording of him plugging his headphones into the airplane headphone jack to watch inflight movies. A more subtle example is in ‘Dragon Warm New Mountain I Believe In You’ by Big Thief. I have grown from a skeptic to a full believe in this band over the years, and one of the many reasons for that is their commitment to capturing an element of the raw space that they are working with in their music. They recorded the double album of the same name in a variety of places around the US, and built in elements of their surroundings into the songs; this track contains the sounds of shattering icicles, with Adrienne Lenker explaining that “It’s actually captured, or archived, energy of that ice in that winter in that point of the world”. On the other end of the spectrum is ‘Silver Secrets’ by Field Works, a collaborative musical project from Stuart Hyatt that creates music out of natural phenomena and soundscapes. Projects of his include records made out of the sounds of scientific equipment, trees, and the geology of south central Texas; this track, featuring Mary Lattimore, is from his album Ultrasonic, which is based around recordings of the echolocations of bats. How cool?!
After a request, I’m also linking the playlist on Tidal now; you can find it here. If anyone would like their playlist in an alternate format, please let me know! Once again, thanks for reading and I’ll be delivering you some more post next Monday. I hope you have a good week and enjoy unearthing the field recordings in these gems of tracks.
Postcard 03: 05/02/2024.
Gold Panda - Metal Bird
King Creosote & Jon Hopkins - John Taylor’s Month Away
Shovel Dance Collective - II: Camera flash on the Deptford foreshore, The Rolling Waves, crashing spring waves by the Cutty Sark
Field Works & Mary Lattimore - Silver Secrets
Big Thief - Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You
Boards of Canada - Turquoise Hexagon Sun
Feremiah Chu & Marta Sofia Honer - Stureby House Piano
Claire Rousay & More Eaze - Songs for a Tuned Guitar
Saintseneca - Frostbiter
Cassandra Jenkins - The Ramble