All my field recordings are unaltered. My influence on them is limited to choosing what to record at what time. And sometimes, like in ‘Betonmolen’, I walk around a bit. Therefor it’s more the audio equivalent of photography in my opinion.

I compare recording often with photography. When I was young, still living at my parents house, we had this garden gate with a special sound. I could even tell who was entering the garden just from the sound. As a memory I would have liked to own a sound recording of that gate instead of a photo. But I didn’t have the equipment back then, so I never recorded it. 

So that is my first reason for recording. Making personal audio snapshots that don’t necessarily mean anything special to somebody else.

When I made more and more recordings at some point the focus changed. I got more concerned about the quality of the sound and, for no particular reason, I developed a whole set of rules for the sounds that I put online. Some rules are clear (about the length, quality, information about the location*) and some are blurry and hard to describe, more ‘artistic’ rules I guess. 
One important rule is ‘don’t influence the subject by recording it’. Which makes those recordings more ’journalistic’ then ‘artistic’. It’s also like making an archive, if you know what I mean. And I like that. That’s another reason for recording.

The last couple of years I also choose sounds for their sound in itself. The ‘Betonmolen’ recording is one of those. It’s a rich mixture of sounds of traffic, people, trams and the concrete mixer. The sound of the concrete mixer isn’t a familiar one. I doubt if anybody would recognise it if it wasn’t in the title. And there’s a radio; a sound that I would normally not record. Because it’s like taking a picture of a painting; pointless. But in this case it is all the sounds combined that made it interesting for me. I guess that’s a third reason for recording.

Thijs Geritz - Betonmolen

This 22 minute long piece is actually based around a forty five second long clip of field recording I made of an orchestra tuning up in a park in Edinburgh a couple of years ago. I recorded it using a hand held H2N recorder.  The original recording was manipulated using audio software.
 
Often within my work I use found sounds and images already existing in the world which i then manipulate and re-appropriate. The aim of this piece was to create an expansive, emotive and cinematic piece of music from a fleeting, potentially overlooked moment which i happened across in the park when i made the recording. 

Rachel Lancaster - Found Orchestra

Kathryn Barnett - Need To Go T'the Library

Chlorine - Roker Beach

A sonic document of the redevelopment of Gateshead Town Centre recorded using a Zoom H4n handheld recording device and 1 Binatone transceiver (walkie talkie) in March 2013, edited in Audacity in November 2015.

The Tesco led reconstruction of the town was nearing completion at the same time as I'd begun experimenting with radio interferences in live performance, so after picking up a lot of construction based radio chatter on the free frequencies in my nearby flat, it made sense to head out and document both layers of the sonic environment simultaneously. I sat in a fixed position outside Shildon House Jobcentre+ for 10 minutes, at 10am, over a 5 day period. The time and duration were arbitrary, the place of recording was not.

Adam Denton - Post-Cinematic Affect

Basic House - Caim In Bird Form

Sophie Cooper - Mosque Midday Canpang Tiga

Sophie Cooper - Coin Star

During the March heatwave a colony of bees moved into the eaves of the roof of Midwich Towers above the spare bedroom.  My little mp3 player has a dictaphone-style recording function so I blu-tacked it to the outside of the window, as close to the bees as I could reach and let it roll for an hour or so.  To my delight this recorded not only the bees going about their business but kids playing in neighbouring gardens, lawnmowers, cars driving past etc.  All very ‘Pleasant Valley Sunday’.  I even got an ambulance siren from the distant main road.  I edited this down to 20 minutes of highlights and layered a gamelanish pulse over it.  This pauses for the ambulance to go past at the eight minute mark, restarts for the second half and is gradually smeared and distorted in what I hope is an hypnotic manner until the inevitable fade out.  

I wanted to capture that delicious fuzzy-headed, been out too long in the sun, red-armed, one too many pipes or cans of beer feeling we can occasionally experience on those rare sunny days. 

A Cut A Score