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

Various - CMCD: 6 Classic Concrete Electroacoustic & Electronic Works, 1970-1990 (1991 compi)

CMCD (Concrete Music CD) is a 1991 compilation, reissued 2004, of six pieces previously featured elsewhere on the ReR label.  I'm posting this mainly for A Quiet Gathering (1988) by Steve Moore, which I got into thanks to a comment from Peter on the Ivana Stefanović album, and was what made me track down the CMCD disc.  It's a phenomenal 22 minutes of "Chamber music for environmental sounds" - children playing, church bells, birds and so on - deftly stitched together.  In the absence of a reissue of the full album (see Peter's YouTube link) this is the only way to get hold of this masterpiece digitally.

Elsewhere, there's two highly entertaining 'plunderphonic' works from US artists bookending this compilation, one mashing up Erik Satie and the other Jerry Lee Lewis.  And don't miss the much more dark-hued Aide Memoire, composed in East Germany by Georg Katzer in 1983.  The subtitle is "Seven nightmares from the thousand year night...with sound documents from 1933-1945".  Even though some of the most infamous voices are tape-manipulated into dalek/chipmunk grotesques that (presumably intentionally) negate much of their power, the piece still carries an unsettling weight of history that neatly expands on Luigi Nono's Ermittlung from two decades previous.

cover art for first issue, 1991 (2004 cover at top)

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!