A typically noisy spring day in the Aberdeenshire countryside. A song thrush sings loudly and variedly from the top of my tallest tree, with crows and pigeons in the background. A tractor ploughing the adjacent field passes, followed by the flock of seagulls that always accompanies the plough. An aircraft passes. None of this seems to disturb the song thrush, but then at the end a pigeon comes close and the thrush falls silent.

Recorded 19 March 2021.

Song thrush

Thunderstorm recorded in Central Buchan, 2 August 2020. The first thunder on an unusually still afternoon disturbs the birds, and then the rain starts....

Thunderstorm

Sheep recorded on the Hill of Barra near Oldmeldrum, 24 August 2020, accompanied by traffic on the B9170.

Sheep

Dawn, 30 May 2021. The forecast was for an absolutely still night, perfect conditions for recording, so I set up the equipment and left it running for eight hours whilst I slept. These are the highlights of the first three hours, in the order in which they happened, but with the long gaps and boring bits edited out so as to compress the story into about six minutes. Nothing happened for the first hour and a half, but then suddenly, well, you tell me! There was then another long pause before the moment I was really interested in catching, the moment when the resident blackbird first starts singing, launching the dawn chorus. In fact my resident blackbird this year seems to be very young and overcautious, and he didn't start until plenty of other distant birds were already active. He sang for about ten minutes then never returned. I've edited out the middle of his song to cut it to about two minutes. There then follows a procession of other early morning visitors, some more expected than others.

Night and Dawn

Common crane, recorded at 5.30am, 17 July 2021, Central Buchan.

Common cranes are not at all common in this part of the world, and I am not aware that I have ever heard one before. The loudest sound in the recording is, I believe, a yellowhammer, constructing its high-pitched song from a single note, and you will also hear pigeons. The crane is the two-tone honking sound.

Image by Andreas Weith from Wikimedia Commons.

Common Crane

My grandmother Nellie Taylor (née Lambert) died on 6 October 1981. I immediately wanted to create a musical memorial to her, and started recording fragments and sketches with the intention of editing them together into a finished piece. This project was never completed, and now 40 years on I've been revisiting some of those recorded fragments. Here's one of them.

Crawshawbooth Fragment

This bird was singing this catchy little six-note tune loudly and repetitively for hours on end outside my Central Buchan home on 24 June 2022.  Friends who are far more ornithologically aware than I am have identified it as a juvenile song thrush, which has not yet learned the persuasive power of variation in repetition.

Unidentified Bird

Have you ever wondered what it sounds like when you're trapped inside a biscuit tin and it's raining?

Biscuit Tin in the Rain

This may be the most complex drone piece I've ever made, though I think it's also one of my most gentle pieces. It's a 40-track recording, which was a challenge to the capabilities of my laptop. It involved two days of processing and several crash-and-recover operations, with a big spreadsheet on a second computer guiding me through the whole process. Of course the 40 tracks are mixed down to stereo here, though they could be played through 40 speakers if anyone wanted to. The piece uses 19-tone equal temperament and tangled hierarchy effects - I've been fascinated by tangled hierarchies since long before I knew there was a name for them - but I don't think you need to understand these to appreciate the music. The title refers not to the Pentland Hills, nor the Pentland Firth, although that stretch of water has featured in my poetry, but to the Pentland Road, the coast-to-coast byway across the moorland interior of the Isle of Lewis, which follows the trackbed of a projected railway that was never completed. The drones in my piece are all portions of a recording of a car journey from Carloway to Stornoway along the Pentland Road, stretched, filtered and tuned to the notes of the 19-tone scale.

The cover image is copyright Jo Turner and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic Licence. The original is on the Geograph project at: www.geograph.org.uk/photo/3050359

Pentland Drones

Frank and Tilly's Dinner (2017) from the album "The Arnage Sessions". See www.highmoss.co.uk/the-arnage-sessions for details.

Frank and Tilly's Dinner

"Fourth Dance" from the album "A Birthday Sequence", released on High Moss, 24 February 2019.
www.highmoss.co.uk

Fourth Dance

The sound of water going down the plughole of the bath in the house in Rossendale where I grew up, slowed down to one-quarter speed but otherwise unmodified. (Note: picture shows a different bath, also in Rossendale.)

Plughole

The last train to Rawtenstall departs from Irwell Vale station on 15 March 2020.

Irwell Vale: East Lancs Railway

The Upper Lake in Haddo Country Park, Aberdeenshire, recorded 21 September 2020.

Haddo: Upper Lake

The wind in the trees at Loudon Wood Stone Circle, recorded 1 November 2020 during Storm Aiden.

Loudon Wood Stone Circle

In ports around the world, ships sound their horns at midnight to welcome the new year.  Since 1993 I have attempted to record this phenomenon in different ports in Scotland.  I think the most successful was this recording made in Aberdeen at the start of 2002.  I recorded for nearly an hour - this is just the first five minutes!

Aberdeen Harbour New Year

Three minutes of mayhem, recorded after an online rehearsal with the four instruments I happened to have close to hand: tenor recorder, cuica, spring drum and ocean drum.  It was made on Hogmanay by the old (Julian) calendar, hence the title.

Old New Year

Haworth Hodgkinson is a composer, improviser and sound artist, as well as a poet and playwright, based in Aberdeenshire and inspired by the landscapes of the North of Scotland. He has published two collections of poetry and his music can be heard on the High Moss label. See www.highmoss.co.uk for details.

Haworth Hodgkinson

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