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 Spanish rivers and Australian goldfields; AA meetings and Tibetan Buddhist ceremonies; a tour of a Japanese tea field and a daring Cold War escape.
John Eckhardt
48k
During the Cold War years of a divided Germany, the resort town of Kühlungsborn became a heavily policed border zone. Still, the doctor Peter Döbler considered it to be his best option for a dangerous escape from East Germany, swimming through the Baltic Sea to the small West German island of Fehmarn. Over nine months, Döbler trained in long-distance swimming, monitored the movements of GDR troops, and distanced himself from his family to prepare for his daring attempt. On July 25, 1971, he dressed in a neoprene suit, packed a small bag with painkillers, methamphetamine, and his medical license, and swam the 48 kilometers to his new life in the Federal Republic. John Eckhardt’s album 48k is dedicated to Döbler and his historic escape. It consists of hydrophonic recordings gathered a few kilometers from the Kühlungsborn shore, which form the basis for haunting, desolate tracks. With his bass guitar and live electronics, Eckhardt imitates the noisy underwater world of the sea, gradually replacing its natural sounds with deep ambient resonances. 48k captures the double identity of this stretch of water in the last half of the 20th century, reflecting in sound its promise and its danger.
John Atkinson & Peter Wolfgang
Spiritus Contra Spiritum
Compact Disc (CD)
Spiritus Contra Spiritum takes its title from a letter that the psychologist Carl Jung wrote to Alcoholics Anonymous founder Bill Wilson and means, in effect, spirituality against spirits. The album follows Peter Wolfgang’s journey of recovery from alcohol addiction through field recordings. While the sounds of recovery are not dramatic or glamorous in themselves, Wolfgang’s friend John Atkinson has isolated tonal structures within them to form a narrative of descent, struggle, and finally, uplift. Automated voices from an insurance company’s phone tree open the album, backed by unsettling, vertiginous ambience. “Angustia” is a similarly discordant, and at times frightfully noisy, evocation of the early days of sobriety. But, in the second half of the album, uplifting piano chords point a way forward until “Pacem,” or peace, is attained with major-chord melodies and natural sounds. The most remarkable part of Spiritus Contra Spiritum, though, is the recordings of AA members describing their own struggles. Together, they create a collective story of courage in the face of inner demons until brief epiphanies occur. “Have you stood in the sunlight with a light breeze in your face, and you just feel the heat from the sun?” asks one man. “And it just makes you want to take a breath and relax… That’s exactly the feeling that I get.”
Pablo Diserens
turning porous
Vinyl LP
Turning Porous is an album of contrasts: the natural world, represented by amphibian and insect life, is full of chirps, stridulations, and songs, while the man-made environment emits long tones and hums. Pablo Diserens spent two months in Galicia, the northwestern autonomous community in Spain, recording its aquatic wildlife. Species like the common midwife toad create tiny chirrups that coalesce into complex rhythmic patterns. Meanwhile, the hydroelectric dam on the Rio Miño generates a nonstop buzz that dominates its surroundings. Diserens navigates the ground between the two extremes by placing microphones in different positions, from the very midst of a group of frogs to a more panoramic view of the total ambience. At times, they even participate themselves by blowing into glass bottles to create complementary tones. They write, “I’m more frog than human these days,” and I’m inclined to believe them—it takes a natural affinity for wildlife to capture these sounds in such clear and striking detail.
Lieven Martens
In Hirokazu-San’s Office, Dried Tea Leaves Are Waiting to Speak
Compact Disc (CD)
Kojima Hirokazu is the chashi, or tea master, of Ujikoen, a tea company founded in 1865 in Yamashiro (now Kizugawa), Kyoto. The musician Lieven Martens and the multimedia artist Floris Vanhoof visited Hirokazu in his office to watch the master at work sipping teas to create the perfect blend. They then toured the factory and the surrounding tea fields to learn the origin of the drink from farm to cup. Martens recorded the experience for this album and its soundscape companion as Dolphins Into the Future. We hear the clinking of dishes at the tea tasting, the birdsong surrounding the tea fields, the clanking of machinery in the factory, the bells from the nearby temple, and the charming interactions between artists and hosts. But Martens has also altered the recordings, adding effects that make the trip hallucinatory: laughter echoes unnaturally, fragile melodies emerge from the background, sounds coalesce into churning rhythms. Never has the world of tea seemed so vibrant, or so strange—take a sip and dive in.
amby downs
occupation studies: soundtracks
Field recordist and sound artist amby downs spent four months in the state archives of Victoria, Australia researching the history of colonial land and water control in the area. It was not an easy task, to put it simply: “My head still hurts from the impact of that intellectual and spiritual dive though, especially because reading bureaucratic correspondence from the early to mid-colonial period is the worst,” she reports. But the result is worth it—an album of field recordings from a region devastated by colonial violence, at once an elegy for the past and a warning for the future. Each track tackles a separate issue or theme, from the first European settlers, to the Victorian gold rush, to contemporary water management plans. The beauty of the Australian landscape is apparent everywhere, but shrouded in eerie echoes and reverb, as if the landscape is lost in a fog brought on by the onset of occupation.
Dalton Alexander
Almost Home If I’m Still Alive
Compact Disc (CD), Vinyl LP
Almost Home If I’m Still Alive is a nostalgic bullet aimed right at the heart of any suburban ‘90s kid. Titles like “Scholastic Book Fair,” “We Used to Live Here,” “Summit Park Tennis Courts,” and “October 11, 1993: Dusk” recall a more innocent, pre-internet era of long afternoons spent wandering the neighborhood. Dalton Alexander’s sparse acoustic guitar amplifies this feeling, but his field recordings are most responsible: small domestic moments, like children gossiping or crickets in the backyard, that are simultaneously specific and relatable. The album is a bittersweet reminder that you can’t come home again, not really—but if you’re in the mood to relive childhood, this is the next best thing.
Marios Moras
Non Living Nature: Compositions for Dictaphone
Cassette
“Recording recording recording… Stopped.” This is the voice of a mystery man, the former owner of a dictaphone bought by Marios Moras in 2020. It begins Non Living Nature: Compositions for Dictaphone, and it also introduces the album’s theme of the end of humanity and the rise of the machine. Throughout the record, field recordings struggle to be heard through tape noise and other mechanical manipulations. A voice whispers in German, birds call out in the distance, a snippet of a record repeats, but all these signs of a thriving Earth are soon overwhelmed again by distortion and static. Moras dedicates the album to the voice on the cassette, an unknown figure who stands in for mankind, sending out a message of existential dread in the face of some calamity. Though Non Living Nature was created through simple means—field recordings, cassettes, a melodica, a synthesizer—it conjures an inscrutable dystopian world fit for a work of science fiction.
Shakali
Nivoin Viivoin
Cassette
Nivoin Viivoin opens with a huge blast of noise: either a blaring horn or metal sheets being scraped against each other. It’s as if Shakali, or Finnish musician Simo Hakalisto, is declaring his presence. But soon he settles into his surroundings to practice what he calls “technology-extended attention practice,” a mode of interaction that demands close observation and responsiveness to one’s environment. Shakali does not obscure his presence in his field recordings; rather, he celebrates it, recognizing himself as just one more noise-making element in a complex sonic geography. He’s both observer and observed, audience and participant. The compositions that he creates with his natural collaborators—birds, bees, children, water, wind—are miniature vignettes of serendipitous encounters, as unpredictable to us as they must have been to him.
Sarah Hennies
Standing Water
New York’s Hudson Valley is teeming with frogs and toads, though for most of the year you wouldn’t know it. But in late spring and early summer, they announce themselves through loud, rhythmic mating calls. The composer Sarah Hennies happens to live near a pond in Red Hook, New York, where this annual event cannot be ignored. So she decided to let the sounds in, opening up the windows and responding to the chorus of amphibians with a trio of bass clarinets and percussion rounded out by Madison Greenstone and Katie Porter. As Hennies explains, they don’t play along with the frogs so much as alongside them: there is “no attempt to ‘blend’ or integrate with their world and rather, perform music that is evocative of how alien it feels to be alone with a loud, noisy, promiscuous group of another species.” The guided improvisation begins slowly, with long, even drones from the clarinetists. Then, at the halfway mark, new dynamics emerge as Hennies’s percussive accents send the clarinets into a curious frenzy, calling and responding to one another like an invented group of animals trying to communicate. Meanwhile, the frogs sing on, oblivious to the concert that they have helped perform. After all, they have other things on their minds.
Pablo Picco
Los Bombásticos y Repetitivos Sonidos de los Buddas de Tashi Ling en Pokhara Nepal
Los Bombásticos y Repetitivos Sonidos de los Buddas de Tashi Ling en Pokhara Nepal is a recording of one day in Pablo Picco and María Victoria Arener’s trip through India and Nepal in 2012. On February 6th, they were in Pokhara, a city at the foot of the Nepalese Himalayas. Here, they recorded the sounds of a Buddhist ceremony in the Tibetan refugee settlement of Tashi Ling—bombastic and repetitive, as the title says, but also hypnotic and entrancing. The chanting of the Buddhists gradually blends into the sounds of nearby rivers and caves and then, unexpectedly, into a wedding band with pounding percussion. These sounds are all edited into a dreamy patchwork whose unreality is accentuated by the slight hiss of the tape itself, a trademark of Picco’s in works under his own name and as Bardo Todol. Like the field recordings of Gonçalo F. Cardoso or Kink Gong, this is both ethnographic and hypnagogic, a document of a real experience distorted and made uncanny with the passage of time.
