Gothic Souls

Jeepneyet Scarate

Hanging Gardens of Babylon Part Two

Hanging Gardens of Babylon Part Three

Hanging Gardens of Babylon Part Four

Most of the field recordings that I post are almost exactly as I receive them at the end of the recording process: I hit record, I hit stop, and most of what happens in between is what I share. Which isn’t to say the audio is “pure” by any means. The device I elect to use for the recording, the time and circumstances when I choose to record, the (usually) continuous clip of 30 seconds I select from within the longer recording — all of these elements, among others, are beyond the bounds of anything that might be self-described as purism. The editing process in particular lends an aspect of self-reflection (even, at times, of what George Eliot taught me to term self-rebuke). When recording the sound emitted inside my refrigerator, for example, I immediately chopped off both ends of the process: first, when I closed the door after placing my phone inside the fridge, and second, when I opened the door to extract my phone. In between those mirror-image poles was a minute or so of sound, from which I then extracted what seemed, to me, like prime climate-controlled droning. Later, however, I kept thinking about the recording process, and I returned to what hadn’t made the initial cut. I combined the two ends into one half-minute whole. The clunky percussion of the fridge drawer and door being shut and, then, opened has a industrial-grade vibrancy. While its jittery, stuttering aspect places it in stark contrast to the monotone of the internal hum of the fridge, these two sets of sounds share a welcome practical simplicity, the beauty of an everyday mechanism at various stages of its utilization.

Recorded on an iPhone 17 Pro at 7:57am on Friday, December 19, 2026, in San Francisco’s Richmond District.

Start Stop

Mist Over Delay Fields

Cities and Memory Autumn Compilation

https://map.citiesandmemory.com/maps/point/3542
https://audioboom.com/posts/8815939-mist-over-delay-fields

"The track was built around a single, imperfect moment in time: a field recording I captured while walking through a tunnel by the main market. You can hear distant voices trading words, footsteps, fragments of conversations and the natural reverb of the tunnel itself. That recording became the spine of the piece – I didn’t treat it as background noise, but as the main “instrument”.

"I started by isolating the most atmospheric sections of the recording, then layered and looped them so the voices and echoes slowly morph into a constant, breathing texture. Multiple delays with different feedback times smear the sounds into long, ghostly trails, while deep reverbs exaggerate the tunnel’s natural space and push everything further into an ambiguous, dreamlike distance.

"From there, I added subtle filtering, pitch shifting and modulation effects to carve movement inside the static drone, so the ambience never sits still. Underneath, a restrained dub techno pulse emerges – low-end hits, soft chords and minimal percussive details – all heavily processed with send delays and tape-style saturation. The result is a slow, hypnotic piece where the original tunnel recording is still recognisable, but transformed into a drifting soundscape: half real-world memory, half submerged, echoing dream."

Jingzhou City South Gate sounds reimagined by Yiannis Vlastaris aka  John Ov3rblast.

https://audioboom.com/

Mist Over Delay Fields

Artileqt - Dyadic

There was a break in the storm, a break between storms. A few days earlier, fire had taken out the city’s power, and now water threatened to do the same. The “atmospheric river,” the “Pineapple Express,” the potential “bomb cyclone” — so many colorful names for what amounted to endlessly grey days. An urban hike to the bay served as an unintentionally ironic way to spend the time when rain wasn’t prohibitively pouring — a walk between the raindrops, as the song goes. Being outside felt good, even as the gathering clouds encouraged a near-term retreat. At the water, the waves seemed more powerful than usual, a microcosm of the week’s weather: fierce pounding, followed by relative quiet, then more water-on-land violence. They're called “breakers” for a reason. I raised my phone and hit the red record button, and almost instantly a distant emergency vehicle’s siren inserted itself, underlining the severity of current circumstances. Listening back to the recording, after I got home, I knew to expect that siren, and still I had to restart the track a few times, because I wasn’t certain if the siren I heard was coming out of my speakers or leaking in from outside, where clouds grew darker by the minute.

Recorded on an iPhone 17 Pro at 3:56pm on Wednesday, December 24, 2025, at Baker Beach in San Francisco.

Storm Breakers

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This Surface Detail is concerned with finding the beauty of the moment, rippling the surface tension.  Contact: thissurfacedetail(at)gmail(dot)com

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This Surface Detail

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