Such heavy breathing, great close perspective!

Stunning recording from beginning to end! 🙌

Incredibly good recording! Do you have a Bandcamp account where I can buy something from you?

Superb inspelning och vilken klarhet i ljudet!

Beautiful Recording! Quite remarkable to hear these birds moving around like this...

Haunting Red Deer rutting in the forest of Orléans

From my new EP: Songs The Night Bird Taught Me, which was inspired by the bittersweet, solitary sound-world of the nocturnal. I hope to take the listener on a journey through starlit waking dreams, inside the liminal world that hums between moonset and sunrise.

Songs The Night Bird Taught Me

The Night Bird

The Night Bird #PianoDay2024

Guido Lusetti - Particelle (extrait )

From dusk to dawn with two pairs of cranes and one or two single male contenders. In this recording you will hear almost infrasound (80-200 Hz) growls and heavy panting as the males chase each other in the wetland and of course the trumpeting of cranes through the night. An amazing experience to be this close. Huddunge, Uppsala. April 9, 2024.

Mixpre 3ii + Lewitt 440 Pure in ortf

Cranes like you never heard them before!

Frogs in the first weeks of activity of the year. It was the warmest night so far, unusually high and although I went to the lake's edge, they were so loud that they could be heard from a long distance. This is also a place to see and hear herons and sometime storks, but this night it was all for the frogs.
I was testing out a Zoom F3 for the second time.

Frogs in the Countryside

LINE_151

Serbian sound artist, poet, curator, and researcher, Manja Ristić returns for her second release for LINE after 2023's 'Awakenings' (LINE_138). Her new album 'Ma' recalls the incredibly subtle, detailed works of Steve Roden, Francisco López, or Bernhard Günter fused with the adept field recordings of Jana Winderen and the delicate resonances of Toshiya Tsunoda. Two entrancing long form works incorporating field recordings, acoustic instruments, and unexpected found sounds.

> https://lineimprint.bandcamp.com/album/ma 

Ma — depth of the space, of the environment, of relations and mystical interrelatedness. The hidden or obvious void that defines the form and liberates from it at the same time. Ma and the sound? The weight of emptiness and quietness is revealed by unexpected density—the space chants, the chants spread in waves, pulsations, a pellucid spectrum of timbre.

“I hear the water dreaming” echoes in my mind.

Patterns of the forest chorus build pandiatonic clouds, on the brim of sonic hallucinations, we hear the space breathing, vellum of light expanding, beyond our hearing range.

Sounds of Ma deep in the ground, on the surface, underwater, on the surface of the water, in the air, between gravity and the air; Ma between air and objects, tubes and thermal bodies, between the Moon and its reflection; bottom of the silent lake and the stratosphere far beyond our world next to the frozen planet with the hidden ocean.

Ma of the soul caught on the tape.

Nothing is necessary.

Nothing holds everything together.

-

List of field recordings and samples:

• Giant anthill in the abandoned forest quarry
• Cricket chorus next to Pohořský rybník lake
• Hydrophone recording of the “silent lake” Stierhüblteich
• Hydrophone recording of the river Schwarze Aist and its various tributaries
• Bowing cymbal under the full moon next to the Schwarze Aist (recorded by Abby Lee Tee)
• Museum of Contemporary Art Ljubljana—ventilation in the man’s toilet (recorded by Mark Vernon)
• Cassini passing between Saturn and Enceladus Moon (NASA sounds)
• Dad’s boiler
• Breath and broken tape recorder hum extracted from Toru Takemitsu’s tape “Ki Sora Tori” (1956)
• Bowing glass vase
• Two wine glasses gently trembling in front of the fan
• Electro-magnetic field around the broken socket
• Violin

Sounds, composition, images, text by Manja Ristić
Mastering La Plant Studio

MANJA RISTIĆ - Ma - 02 Full Moon Trembles On The Surface Of The Creek

I got to spend December 2023 recording in several jungle locations in Costa Rica. The experience was wonderful and inspiring. Most of the trip was spent on Osa Peninsula, in lodges that bordered Parque Nacional Corcovado (Corcovado National Park). With nearly 2.5% of the world's species represented, many of them endemic, it is  recognized as one of the most biodiverse regions on the planet.

On the same morning as the previous  Midnight Chorus recording https://soundcloud.com/soundeziner/cr-fincasueno-midnightchorus, a troop of Golden Mantled Howler Monkeys greeted the Dawn and their neighbors (and the rest of the jungle) the only way they know how. Male mantled howlers have an enlarged hyoid bone, a hollow amplifying bone near their vocal cords that gives the ability to generate great "howling"  calls that can heard for kilometers.  Howling allows the monkeys to exercise territory and remain in contact  without expending energy through movement or bearing the risks of physical confrontation. As someone who likes little more than sitting in a forest listening to nature speak, I approve of this lazing behavior.

While this howling is their most well-known vocal characteristic, I'm rather fond of the popping and grunting that warms up to the howl and pads the time in between. It's relatively quiet, and is most noticeable only when near the vocalizing howler. The best description of it that I can think of is like the "vocal fry" not uncommon in many of today's pop singers. Check it out near the start of the first round of howling around 2:40 (link in the comments)

After a first round of loud howls, the group takes a break. With what is known about Mantled Howler activity, they're likely sleeping, or maybe eating. After 20-is minutes, they pick up again for a brief session before settling back down. It's possible they've been moving during this time as they're quieter during this round. Finally, just before Sunrise at 05:38 in the morning, they pick up again, slowly building and then tapering off after nearly 30 minutes of vocal exercising.

After speaking with other recordists, I know I am far from alone as someone who loves their sound, but I I may be one of the few that enjoys waking up to their calls. Every morning I heard this in the distance or nearby was a morning I walked out to breakfast with a big silly grin on my face.

Another voice that has become a personal favorite is the Yellow-throated Toucan, with their rhythmic, bouncing song that seems to carry on forever. There is at least one singing for most of this recording, but you can get your first good listen behind the Howlers at 53:27 or skip ahead to 1:06:02 to hear two singing at each other.

Hummingbirds are abundant, and you'll hear their buzzing wings fly by and around the microphones numerous times. Also coming and going are raucous and noisy Scarlet Macaws and Red-lored Parrots, a lone Red-eyed Tree Frog, a visiting Little Tinamou, and more. 

I'll point out a few voices along the way in the comments, but I'm out of my depth when it comes to identifying neotropical birds, so I'll largely let the ecosystem speak for itself. Feel free to poke around with links in the comments to scoot around the recording, or just let it play out over your morning coffee like I do.

Feel like seeing some fancy colors? I've been playing at visualizing soundscapes lately. Check out the video for this recording on YouTube: https://youtu.be/duxU2INkyXI?si=xhIrgiHiOSOk922l

AMNS Costa Rica 01

Golden Mantled Howlers at Dawn

Marco Lucchi, based in Modena, Italy, and Henrik Meierkord, based in Stockholm, Sweden, have a lengthy collaboration to their reciprocal credit, and they accomplish it far and near alike. A testament to the interplay of their work together is that a listener might be hard-pressed to discern which of their recordings are the result of long-distance file-trading, and which occurred when the two managed to be in the same place at the same time.

Several aspects of their respective music-making serve them well as creative partners. First of all, both tend toward the ambient, given as they are generally to a slow pace and to a sensibility that manages to be at once radiant and intimate. Secondly, while both are multi-instrumentalists, there is a complementary nature to their specialties, Lucchi being more of a keyboardist, Meierkord more of a string player. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, they are both immersed in techniques drawn from electronic music.

In particular, both men are experienced with live multitrack recording, in which they process and layer their own performances in real time. Meierkord is fond of layering sinuous tones to create scenarios of unique dimensions. It becomes uncertain — even unimportant — to the listener what preceded what, so intricate is his deployment of interplay. Lucchi likewise finds parallels between classical orchestration and the opportunity for drones lent by modern synthesizers; in a small room he can create a vast space. There is often an oceanic depth to such efforts, part composed and part improvisatory, in which playing is a tool toward composition, rather than the other way around.

Throughout their new record, there is an underlying melancholy, a nostalgic beauty, and a reflective consideration — a virtue that is foundational to their ongoing collaboration. The result is particularly rich in plaintive scene setting, as on the glacially paced “La bestia umana,” which emerges from a neighborly field recording of a dog barking, and “Kosmisk Strålning II,” which maintains a dream-like quietude, more shadow than light. One “Like tears in rain”, what sounds like a synthesizer is, in fact, a piano, a recording of which has been stretched beyond the point of it being readily identifiable.

On first listen, their leaning toward unimpeachable steadiness can seem uniform, but listen more closely and you’ll recognize how explicitly they emote on a track like “The Third Stage,” due not just to the reaching melodic surges (which, in turn, match the sampled recordings of bird calls) but to the slight discordances that suggest trouble and tension. In a different manner, there is “A warm and golden October,” which balances breaking-dawn hush with piercing overtones. That track features a motif at the end, played on a celesta; those bell-like tones edge the piece out of dreaminess without entirely breaking the spell.

The greatest outlier — dog barking notwithstanding — may be on “Oändlig,” not just for its fierce pulse, but because of its more immediately electronic vibe. “Oändlig” is an exceptional piece, bringing to mind the minimalism of Terry Riley and the rave classics of Underworld.

Marc Weidenbaum 


Produced and mixed by Marco Lucchi and Henrik Meierkord
Marco Lucchi: mellotron, piano, celesta and synthesizers
Henrik Meierkord: cello, viola, zither, piano, organ and FX
Mastered by Dionis Afonichev (Dionisaf)
Cover picture by Dionis Afonichev (Dionisaf) with AI
Artwork and cover design by Dionis Afonichev (Dionisaf)

https://www.chitrarecords.com

Lieder Ohne Worte

La Bestia Umana

An electronic composition, sounds created in Pure Data.

Asunder (naviarhaiku556)

Recorded & mixed on 07 Nov 2009 & 30 Aug 2024 by Jim Lemanowicz at Blissville Electro-Magnetic Laboratories of Massapequa. 

Process notes -
I started with a Nov 2009 “home field recording” I made using a small 1960s transistor radio to detect/probe electromagnetic fields around my apartment, which itself was inspired by Nicolas Collins’ book *Handmade Electronic Music.* 

I recorded this using a Sony Cybershot DSC-W50. I recorded things like computer hard drives, a Blackberry phone, a TV, an electric toothbrush, a microwave, a refrigerator and light fixtures using this technique. Not sure what made it onto this piece. 

I selected small pieces of this 9.5 minute recording and dragged them into a total of 11 tracks in Ableton Live. Some tracks use MIDI instruments and others play the tracks in real time or altered with Live’s warping modes.

Tools used -
Ableton Live, IRCAM IM-Mover, Slate + Ash Cycles, Ableton Granulator III & other native Live devices

The full audio/video for this “radio probe” source can be heard/seen on my YouTube here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GK4vmRqBd68. 

I put together a small body of raw material inspired by the book back in 2009, some of it is still on YouTube. The YouTube videos use Magix Music Maker for video editing, IIRC. 

Artwork/Photography - Long Island, NY, USA, North Fork - 19 Oct 2008 - using the same Sony camera mentioned above.

----

This original version of “Bags Of Mostly Verdant Electrons” was submitted as part of Disquiet Junto Project 0661: Consumer Drone Product. The Assignment: Record a piece of drone music using sounds from your home.

More on the Disquiet Junto at: disquiet.com/junto/

More on the 661st weekly Disquiet Junto project, Consumer Drone Product — The Assignment: Record a piece of drone music using sounds from your home — at https://disquiet.com/0661/

Bags Of Mostly Verdant Electrons  (disquiet0661)

the tape is now the music

Field sound recordist and archivist of vanishing sounds in natural Iandscapes. Highly commended in the Sound of the Year Awards 2024 - Best Natural Sound.

Cranes like you never heard them before!

Bo Söderström

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Wild Bird Acoustics

Håkan Johansson

Sound Xplorer (Stephane Fufa)

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