Echoes Of Nature - Wilderness River (1993)

The charity shop oddities just keep coming at the moment - here's an addition to that small corner of SGTG that features no music at all, but just captures a variety of natural sounds and presents them in album format.  This one, on the budget LaserLight label's Echoes Of Nature series from the 90s, offers exactly an hour of riverside recordings across four continuously-mixed tracks.  

 

The self-descriptive titles - Big River, Streamside Songbirds, Small Rapids and Crickets & Water - are pretty much all you need to know, other than it's all well recorded (that DDD coding is making me picture someone with a DAT machine in their backpack and a couple of microphones dangling over a bridge), and it does the job if you want to relax with nature for a bit.

link

pw: sgtg

Geoff Sample - Bird Songs & Calls (2010)

Bought this little book and accompanying triple-CD set from a closedown sale in a popup bookstore a few years back, and didn't give it much attention until recently when I felt like listening to something a bit different.  Ripped the discs - 229 tracks over three and a half hours, that's got to be a record for this blog! - and gave it a listen; then decided it was definitely worth sharing.

Geoff Sample is an English naturalist/ornithologist/sound recordist who's been releasing CDs of birdsong going back to the 90s, and also pops up on BBC radio programmes now and then with some of his recordings.  Here, he narrates the songs and calls of British birds grouped into their habitats, spending about ten to fifteen minutes in each section: House & Garden, Farmland, Hedges & Scrub and so on, all the way through to Rocky Coast.  The third CD is different - it's a guide to recognising bird song, from the simplest to the more complicated.  The book cross-references the CD tracks with brief descriptions of each bird, its migratory patterns, when best to find it etc.

The two main CDs are a really enjoyable listen - the various bird sounds, coupled with Sample's unobtrusive narration in the pleasant burr of his Northumbrian accent, actually make the first disc in particular a quite relaxing experience.  The second CD maybe not so much - some of these feathered performers are loud!  Nevertheless the whole thing is a very well put together, great-sounding immersion in birdsong.

Disc 1 link

Disc 2 link

Disc 3 link

pw: sgtg

Claude Schryer - Autour (1997)

 More environmental/radiophonic sound composition to kick off this week, courtesy of Claude Schryer, born 1959 in Québec.  Four of his works covering 1995-97 are featured on this collection, but rather than being lengthy tracks like when I've previously posted this sort of thing, Schryer works in short snippets averaging two minutes (excepting the 11-minute closing piece).  The result is more like a gallery of photographs in sound than an immersive film, but no less evocative for that.

First up is Musique De L'Odysée Sonore, which did actually start life as the soundtrack to a National Film Board of Canada documentary about Québec City, before Schryer revised and condensed it into 11 minutes.  For me, the most striking of the seven sections here is Église, which encapsulates Schryer's talent for weaving together his sound sources (a grandfather clock, a boat horn, a Popol Vuh-esque choral improv, a Native American chant and garbled spoken poetry) into something truly ear-bending.

Switching continents next, Schryer uses recordings from Mexico City and Oaxaca state for El Medio Ambiente Acustico de México, itself cut down from a 50-minute radiophonic work Marche Sonore II.  Ocean sounds and fields give way to inner-city subway sounds, trains, trucks and marching bands in a parade, and another ambient trip back into nature - all of it evoking its sense of place beautifully.  After that, there's a trip back in place and in time with Vancouver Soundscape Revisited, where the source sounds were recorded in the early 70s for the World Soundscape Project.  Schryer describes his method as selecting a few hundred samples from the project by sonic spectrum, pitch, function and context, and again deftly combines them all into a stunning work.

Closing the disc is the standalone piece Autour d'Une Musique Portuaire, where the harbour sounds, bells and trains originally used for a live radio broadcast (with Schryer directing the 'performers' on the boats, trains and cathedral bells to play together by walkie-talkie!) were re-purposed in the studio for a saxophonist, trombonist and clarinetist (Schryer) to improvise over.  The result makes the most of the wide open spaces and long boat-horn drones to let the instruments fill in the gaps perfectly.

link

Australian Soundscape series - White Water Rafting (1994)

Couldn't resist posting this - it's another charity shop classic.  Parted with my 99p as soon as I saw this CD, as the cover just made me laugh out loud.  Anyone else ever considered white water rafting to be "the ultimate in relaxation"?  The notes on the back cover absolutely sealed the deal, as they made me wonder if the whole exercise had been some sort of knowing pisstake - here they are in full:

"Ah, the excitement as you narrowly miss the threatening rocks around you whilst the racing water below attempts to engulf you at every turn... You are ready to relax - the wondrous sounds of nature await you..."

So how much excitement/relaxation is really to be had on this hour-long recording?  To be perfectly honest, it sounds like an hour of someone recording some birds by the side of a fast-flowing river, and I ended up quite enjoying it on those terms.  Whether someone involved in the CD release just then shoehorned in the whole rafting thing for the tourist market (other releases in the series covered camping, sailing in the Great Barrier Reef and morning in the Outback).... who knows.  As fans of Loon Talk and Frog Talk will be aware, I live for these kind of little oddities whenever they present themselves.  Oh, and in the inside cover was a list of musical releases by a related label - if I ever manage to get my hands on 'Yodelling Down Under' - you lucky, lucky people....

link

NorthSound Audio - Frog Talk (1990)

From the Canadian NorthSound Audio label that also brought you Loon Talk, here's the self-explanatory Frog Talk.  From the sleevenotes: "As the frogs begin their gentle night chanting, you may find yourself mesmerized by one of the most elemental of sounds."  I suppose in some ways, some of this might be relaxing, but it frequently sounds to my ears at least more like pretty abrasive electronic music gone haywire.  Which is not a bad thing, of course.  See what you think - whether the spring peepers, wood frogs, green frogs and pickerel frogs of this hour-long release enchant you or rile you, hopefully you may find this as inexplicably addictive as I do.

link

NorthSound Audio - Loon Talk (1990)

Enjoyed posting the Dawn & Dusk Environments album, and still enjoying listening to it (hope you are too!), so here's a post of the other birdsong disc that I currently have.  The common loon is basically Jan Garbarek in avaian form, with haunting keening, piping sounds being its core repertoire - and it has quite a sophisticated vocabulary, according to the informative sleevenote.  Multipurpose tremoloes, territorial yodels, quiet location hoots and night choruses of wailing - this early 90s recording from the Canadian wilderness has all the hits.

Similar to the Dawn & Dusk album, Loon Talk has two different recordings, each just under half an hour.  I'd say I give the first track more regular rotation - the second is a bit on the 'busy' side; but both are well-recorded and perfectly evocative of this ECM-worthy creature in its natural habitat.

link

Syntonic Research Inc. - Environments: Dawn & Dusk at New Hope, PA (1987 compi, rec. '69-'70)

Another series of fascinating recordings that the blogworld introduced me to was the Environments records.  Taped in the field, on the seashore and elsewhere throughout the 1970s, these pioneering environmental recordings were all the work of one man, Irv Teibel, operating under the name Syntonic Reseach Inc.  In the late 80s, Atlantic compiled three CDs from material released on the first three LPs - the seashore one, the bell tones, and this one.

I'd been hunting around for a copy of the New Hope CD for a while - seems to be scarcer these days than the other two CDs - and finally managed to get hold of one a few weeks ago that wasn't going for an insane price.  So here it is - two half-hours of pure natural sound, unchanged for thousands of years, just waiting to be captured in June 1969/August 1970 by Teibel and his trusty 4-track Uher.

From the sleevenotes:

"Dawn at New Hope recreates the aural environment of a beautiful morning in late spring, complete with magpies, owls, crows, doves, woodpeckers, insects and geese.
Dusk at New Hope, recorded [a year and] two months later at the very same spot, contains a superb recording of night insects in stereo syncopation. On the right channel, you have nearby crickets. On the left channel, you have distant mixed insects."

New Hope Pennsylvania faces onto the Delaware River with New Jersey on the other bank - I've never been, but thanks to Google I can now take a virtual stroll around.  Picked a random starting point here - fittingly for both the album and the name of this blog, there's definitely some geese.

link


Update - couple of links I've been sent:

A really great, detailed website all about Teibel/Environments 

 and a lengthy Pitchfork piece - fascinating reading!

Update Feb. 2018: Environments, the app!