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 crickets in Melbourne and a beehive in Ghent, trains in Kansas City and ambulances in Karachi, a quarry in Mexico City, and an ice floe in Antarctica.
Bosque Vacío
Cantera Oriente
Compact Disc (CD)
The Xitle volcano erupted in the third century, covering a large area of central Mexico in basaltic rock. Fast forward to the mid-20th century, and a rapidly growing Mexico City needed that rock for new buildings and roads. The Cantera Oriente, or East Quarry, was the result, an environmental disaster that disrupted an important ecological zone. Still, they dug and dug until they hit the water table and flooded the quarry. Activists urgently called for a halt to the destruction, and in the 1990s the Cantera became an ecological reserve controlled by the National Autonomous University of Mexico. And so, from volcano to quarry to lake to nature preserve, the history of the place is written into the landscape. It’s a contested history still: The City and the University threaten to impinge on the protected area from all sides. As Bosque Vacío, Leena Lee, and Guillermo Guevara investigate this history and its meaning by literally diving in: The first sound you hear on Cantera Oriente is Lee taking a deep breath before plunging into its waters. Across five tracks, Lee and Guevara map the space both above and below the water line, complementing their field recordings with subtle but dramatic drones. Amid these ambient washes, wildlife appear, a sure sign that the environment is recovering; but the Cantera Oriente is a fragile space and this is only a document of its current state, not a guaranteed future. The City, just out of sight, is still waiting, still growing.
KMRU
Natur
Compact Disc (CD)
When Joseph Kamaru moved from Kenya to Germany, the first thing he noticed was the silence. Nairobi was full of talking people, chirping birds, and chirruping insects, and buzzing electrical lines and transformers. In comparison, Berlin was dead quiet, especially at night. But this was a false silence; the electrical grid was there, but hidden underground; the people were there, but locked in their apartments; nature was there, but pushed to the outskirts of the city. These elements became the component parts of Natur, a 52-minute composition that explores the differences between Kamaru’s native and adopted cities. The overwhelming sonic signature of the album is the hum and static of electronics, usually unheard by the human ear, that KMRU sought out with electromagnetic microphones. Over the course of months of touring with this piece, Kamaru edited and re-edited these sheets of noise until he “became” the piece, in his words. The result is a perfectly calibrated symphony of electronic sound that moves seamlessly between ambient lulls and dramatic crescendos. But natural sounds hover in the interstices of the fuzz and the feedback, suggesting a different relationship between city and country: the urban environment is recast as a technology for keeping nature at bay, but whether in Nairobi or Berlin, technology eventually fails.
Lia Kohl
Normal Sounds
Vinyl LP
Cellist and composer Lia Kohl’s Normal Sounds is about the mundane noises that exist at the periphery, only fully capturing our attention if they become too aggressive or too annoying. She uses field recordings of car alarms, tornado sirens, grocery checkouts, and airplane cabins as the base for dazzling pieces for cello, saxophone, and synths. The song titles are a guide to the sounds she chose. On “Tennis Court Light, Snow,” the buzz of stadium lighting provides the harmonic foundation for her cello; on “Car Horns,” Patrick Shiroishi plays saxophone along with traffic; on “Ignition, Sneakers,” the beeping of a car’s ignition and the squeaking of sneakers on a basketball court support a bouncy synth line. Even the most dissonant sounds are incorporated beautifully into the whole and made an integral part of each melody. Kohl calls her approach to this album “a practice of trying to be more alive,” and her regard for these sounds—her respect for them, even—suggests the depths of experience that we all miss by tuning them out of our everyday lives. The next time you notice your refrigerator humming or your clock ticking, take an extra moment and really listen to these normal sounds.
Austyn Wohlers
Bodymelt in the Garden of Death
Cassette
Austyn Wohlers’ main gig is with dream pop band Tomato Flower, and she brings the heavy-but-bright dynamics of that group to bear on Bodymelt in the Garden of Death. She crafts what could be called a “fieldgaze” album: pristine field recordings alternately competing with and complementing buzzing, humming guitars, the natural sounds always at risk of being subsumed by noise. Take, for example, album opener “Grasshopper Heaven”: a mass of cicadas makes up the background of the song, but is so carefully incorporated into a glimmering drone that they pass in and out of perception. This is true throughout the album, until the feedback-drenched guitars on “How Heavy the Slow World” seem to have won out—but even here, a chorus of birdsong enters in the finale, segueing into the blissful burbling of a mountain stream on final track “Meadow of Tears.” The title of the album came to Wohlers as she embraced her mother in her garden after a serious illness, the colors of the flowers glowing in the sunset. That moment is a fitting image for the album as a whole: grief, relief, and the enduring beauty of nature combined in a gorgeous drift.
Christopher McFall
I Throw the Switch on the Midnight Snake
Compact Disc (CD)
Trains have been an integral part of the DNA of field recording since Pierre Schaeffer’s Étude aux chemins de fer, the first piece of musique concrète, was presented in 1948. Christopher McFall follows in that tradition, but goes far beyond the expected chugging of engines and blaring of whistles. For I Throw the Switch on the Midnight Snake, he sought out trainyards in Kansas City, Missouri in which some trains stop for maintenance but others are allowed through without stopping. This granted him the opportunity to gather a full spectrum of material, rather than the usual hectic blast of noise from a locomotive rushing past. There is no denying that these recordings are dense and mechanical, the sounds of heavy industry operating at speed. But McFall edits and layers them into a set of surprisingly calm pieces; often, it’s difficult to tell that they were sourced from a rail yard at all. Just like Schaeffer did over 75 years ago, McFall invites us to find music in the least likely of places—and proves what is possible when you do.
Luke Drozd
The Plague Raves
Vinyl LP
Field recording, generally speaking, leads people outside, whether to the ends of the Earth or just to the front yard. But what do you do if you can’t leave the house? Luke Drozd’s The Plague Raves is a field recording without the field, a diary of the time that we all had to spend inside during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns. With treated field recordings, dialogue taken from found sources, and amateur piano playing, Drozd documents a slow decline into ennui, if not madness. On “Keep Calm & Carry On Coughing,” we hear him pacing back and forth before a team of psychiatrists begins asking questions: “How is it that playing the piano for people has eventually resulted in your being here in the hospital? They dislike you because you sit differently at the piano? What way do you sit at the piano that people would dislike you?” As if in answer, Drozd begins plinking out a simple melody on the keys. Then, another voice seemingly explains the reason for the quarantine: “Being active and healthy is no defense. And if it strikes at you, it strikes at your children.” By turns charming and alarming, comic and claustrophobic, this is an outrageous but true-to-life document of isolation and its paranoid effects.
Fletina and Peter Wullen
Trophallaxis
Trophallaxis is the process of sharing food among social insects like ants, termites, or bees. For the Scottish sound artist Fletina and Belgian field recordist Peter Wullen, though, it also describes the back-and-forth of ideas between collaborating artists, the sharing of materials that keeps the project productive. The title was inspired by one of the sources here, a beehive at Ghent’s Klein Begijnhof, a type of convent for lay religious women dating from 1235. But the trophallaxis between artists means that many more sounds were shared from towns scattered across the UK and Belgium. We hear water dripping in a cemetery, people talking, birds singing, and throughout, the repeated bell-ringing and calling of a priest from Bela Tarr’s epic film Sátántangó. The effect is like traveling back in time to that convent, where the only news comes from what you can hear around you: overheard conversations, messages from the town crier, and what can be gleaned from the buzzing of bees or the cawing of crows.
MJ O’Neill
932 Sirens
The audio that makes up 932 Sirens comes from a dataset produced by researchers at Ziauddin University in Karachi, Pakistan, but MJ O’Neill has transformed it from an object of investigation into one of contemplation. Whereas the researchers gathered these sounds of sirens to teach AI models how to distinguish emergency vehicles from normal traffic, O’Neill saw a more human use for them. “932 Sirens is not a recording with a straightforward ideology,” she writes. “In some ways, it’s an attempt to convey my lifelong experience of the world. In others, it’s a reflection of living in a world in a state of near-constant collapse. In a very real way, it’s an attempt to appropriately acknowledge the genocide of Palestine.” Sirens can mean impending violence or approaching aid; they can be a warning or a sign of hope. Their unique sonic signature, recognizable throughout the album, is made over into an instrument with surprising range. O’Neill gradually abstracts these sirens into new shapes, from the frantic glitches of “our world’s magic has run amok” to the deep, patient drone of album centerpiece “cursing the glittering and hopeful.” The urgency of the siren’s call persists throughout 932 Sirens, but O’Neill has added to it a complex and haunting beauty.
Karen Power
…we return to ground…
Compact Disc (CD)
Whereas other composers may write a piece by sitting at a laptop or a piano, Karen Power is more likely to travel into the wilderness. Her “aural scores” often take the form of field recordings that she invites musicians to play along with, thus blurring the boundary between natural sound and music. The double album …we return to ground… collects three such pieces performed by the Quiet Music Ensemble. The title track features underwater life that clicks and chitters while the QME alternately mimics these creatures and provides them with new aquatic ambiences. “sonic pollinators” is full of buzzing insects that create a tense atmosphere, heightened by frantically bowed bass and cello, blasts of trombone and squeaks of clarinet. Finally, Antarctic ice pops, cracks, and melts on “instruments of ice” until the ensemble looms into view like an iceberg over the horizon. This is not purely field recording nor chamber music, improvisation nor composition, but a form that thrillingly transgresses the boundaries of each of these practices to present us with a new way to listen to—and interact with—the sounds of nature.
amby downs
garrawang + biderap: black field cricket mating song
On its face, this album does what it says on the tin: amby downs collected recordings of black field cricket mating songs during garrawang and biderap, the hot, dry seasons of the Wurundjeri land in and around Melbourne, Australia. But to listen for even a moment unveils much more. Together with other incidental sounds, the cries of the crickets reverberate in a massive and ever-shifting space. Sounds dissolve and reappear in loops, creating barely intelligible sequences in what seems like a limitless void. downs writes that “Grief and melancholy are woven into this work, created during a time when the world’s most brutal horrors are present every day in front of my eyes despite being thousands of kilometers away.” garrawang + biderap is a working-through of this trauma, a process of orienting oneself in a strange and bewildering new environment. But, across its 47 minutes, you learn that you can do it: each sound eventually defines itself and patterns slowly emerge, making the piece less alien but no less astonishing.
