On Sundays I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I would later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.
This week, all field recordings:
▰ George Vlad reports from a spot in Surrey, England, where he managed to record nature sounds without intrusion of passing cars and planes. He writes: “I recently discovered one such pocket of quiet while hiking in my local patch in Surrey. It’s a wooded valley nestled between two hills with a small brook at the bottom. There’s some farmland nearby but this time of the year there isn’t much activity, and the only road in the area isn’t too busy. It took me a couple of drop rig attempts before I could get the balanced perspective I had in mind. I wanted the natural geography to act as a kind of parabola, focusing the bird calls towards where my mic was. I also wanted to capture the subtle babbling of the water.” More detail at the link and from Vlad at wildaesthesia.bandcamp.com.
▰ The great Bandcamp account of freetousesound posted a collection of 28 short snippets of birdsong from Sri Lanka, plus two five-minute-long opening tracks.
▰ Seán Ronayne, late last year, posted a set that combines Irish and Catalan field recordings. The notes state “[E]very effort has been made to produce tracks free from anthropogenic (human-made) noise. However, traces may appear. I have chosen to let these rare instances through, rather than lose a track because of their minimal intrusion.” This strikes me as a wise, in the Solomonic sense.
▰ And for something far more urban, Jan Sampermans recorded, from a hotel rooftop, the honking and general bustle of Bangalore:
