This is a recording I made of an outdoor winter storing lot of pleasure craft near Montrose Harbor before dawn in Chicago in February, 2021. The sound you hear is a morning winter wind blowing and bouncing rigging against the masts of scores of sailboats. Recorded in ORTF with a Sennheiser 8040 pair, and a MixPre6ii.

Drydock Winter Chorus

Here's a recording of a birdhouse in the late winter wind on a small peninsula in Pine Lake in Indiana, April 2021. I recorded it with a new AKG C411 contact microphone, which didn't like the cold very much. Not to put too fine a point on it, but if you listen carefully you can hear the steel of the birdhouse post ringing in the wind.

A Little Birdhouse in Your Cold

This is a recording of the steel rail leading to the top of Monk's Mound, the main site at Cahokia a national monument, near St. Louis. I made it with a Geofon by LOM and a MixPre6ii by Sound Devices. Cahokia was the center of a culture called the Mississippian people which flourished from the 9th to the 14th centuries. Cahokia was their capitol, a city more populous than London at the time, and its influence stretched from Wisconsin to Louisiana, from the Appalachians to the high plains. But you can't hear any of that in the recording. What you can hear is wind struggling against a wall of noise pollution that bears down on the quiet site, spilling in on all sides from nearby Interstate highways, freight trains and rumbling barges from the Mississippi River.

Monk's Mound

This is a sound I created for my first full-length work of audio fiction, American Bottom, based on a script by Brett Neveu, which debuts next week. 

https://aredorchidtheatre.org/ab-info/

American Bottom is an experimental work of audio fiction, written in verse, performed by a full cast and featuring original music, animation and artwork. It explores the interconnectedness of time, place, people and sound by bringing together folk stories and sonic fragments from a region of Southern Illinois along the Mississippi River near the site of the historic Cahokia mounds, a place known today as American Bottom. Ten years ago, Kevin disappeared somewhere in the region. American Bottom follows the thoughts of the people who knew him while exploring the many layers of earth and life and story connected to the place he called home.

The piece was collectively conceived by Brett Neveu, artist Rich Sparks, composer Matthew Muniz, foley artist Ele Matelan and digital art editor Frankie Pedersen. 

The sound is built from the noise pollution in the handrail on Monk’s Mound in Cahokia I made with a contact mic, a magnetic field at Modoc Cliff I recorded with a copper coil recorder, the sustain from the first note of the show that I drew out and elongated, some sweeteners from a rebar recordings Ele created, and some wire recordings I made in Scotland that I use for pretty much everything. A few bug sounds in there that I made with a huge slab of aluminum and some kids toy bugs, if you listen close.

Star Sound

Here's another sound from our new work of audio fiction, American Bottom, which debuts next week.

American Bottom is the name of a region of Southern Illinois where humans have lived and sheltered since before they built the pyramids in Egypt. A thousand years ago came its heyday, when the great Indigenous city of Cahokia flourished there, more populous than London at the time. A flood plain of the Mississippi, American Bottom is also the site of sudden, inexplicable destructions and disappearances of whole cities and communities. It's been called the American Atlantis.

I wanted to create an introduction that captures that cycle of destruction and renewal, and when I was traveling in the region I found an uncontrolled (no alarm or barrier) freight train crossing where I probably wasn't supposed to be. I attached a geophone to the steel outside of my car, and mixed it with an AB pair of omnidirectional lav mics inside the car. I drove up to the stop as the train was approaching to capture the audio in this scene. The result has some distortion, but in this case I used it anyway, in some ways the distortion is the point. I later layered in some foley by Ele Matelan to make it read a little more like a railway. 

It's also a bit of an allusion to a scene in Lucille Fletcher's The Hitch-hiker, an old radio play that features a brilliant railway scene. 
 
aredorchidtheatre.org/ab-info/

American Bottom is an experimental work of audio fiction, written in verse, performed by a full cast and featuring original music, animation and artwork. It explores the interconnectedness of time, place, people and sound by bringing together folk stories and sonic fragments from a region of Southern Illinois along the Mississippi River near the site of the historic Cahokia mounds, a place known today as American Bottom. Ten years ago, Kevin disappeared somewhere in the region. American Bottom follows the thoughts of the people who knew him while exploring the many layers of earth and life and story connected to the place he called home.

The piece was collectively conceived by Brett Neveu, artist Rich Sparks, composer Matthew Muniz, foley artist Ele Matelan and digital art editor Frankie Pedersen.

Uncontrolled Stop

American Bottom is a work of experimental audio fiction based on an original long poem by playwright Brett Neveu, incorporating into the text original field recording, performed narration, music, foley and sound. It is designed to be listened to with headphones.

The poem takes the form of a sonic memory ritual linking characters, voices and settings around a supernatural event. But American Bottom isn't a linear narrative. Instead, it offers a series of interwoven stories and sonic fragments from the “American Bottom” region of Southern Illinois, so-called because it is a flood plain on what was the “American” side of the Mississippi during French colonial times, across the river from present-day St. Louis. The region is home to Cahokia, a medieval-era Indigenous city of mounds that was the capital of the Mississippian civilization, which casts a mysterious historical shadow across the region. It’s also home to Kaskaskia, the first Illinois capital, which has been destroyed in floods four times – it's sometimes called the “American Atlantis” – and other key historic sites, including one of the first incorporated Black towns in the U.S., Brooklyn, Illinois. 

Neveu’s poem takes place in contemporary times, but it is created with these histories, cataclysms and mysteries in mind, with characters transfixed by fragments of forgotten and recovered history, scattered across a semi-rural landscape that is itself transforming through decay, disinvestment and reinvention.

American Bottom was created by a collective, including me, Neil Verma (Director), Brett Neveu (Writer), Ele Matelan (Foley Artist), Matthew Muniz (Music) Frankie Pedersen (Indigenous Consultant and Digital Art Editor) and Rich Sparks (Visual Arts) and was presented as an online audio drama by A Red Orchid Theatre in Chicago in June of 2021. The performers were: Echaka Agba, Sherman Edwards, Caleb Wayne Fath, Bernard Gilbert, Lawrence Grimm, Charlie Herman, Amanda Raquel Martinez and June Thiele.

American Bottom was mixed by Alex Inglizian, and our recording engineer was Troy Cruz. Many thanks to Stephan Moore and Gregory Whitehead for their advice, to Jeff Kolar for the use of his static recordings, and Northwestern University for the seed money and recording space. 

All the field recordings, songs, foley and performances were captured specifically for this piece. Recordings took place in Randolph, Monroe, Madison, St. Clair and Cook Counties in Illinois.

American Bottom Hi Res

This recording is a mix of field recordings made by the sound seminar at the Summer Institute at Cologne while we studied together at Theaterwissenschaftliche Sammlung in Schloss Wahn. The recordists were Crystal Camargo, Kelly Coyne, Joseph Franjoine, Evelyn Kreutzer, Pushpita Mitra, Peter Moormann, Hannah Paveck, José Ramirez, Neil Verma. Recordings were made with Zoom H2N mics and a Sennheiser 816 recorded with a Sound Devices MixPre 3. "Castle of Illusion" aired as part of the Radiophrenia Festival in Glasgow in Spring 2019.

Schloss Wahn

This is a blended set of field recordings I made at Borough fish market in London in 2018. I recorded them with a set of Sennheiser binaural in-ear Ambeo mics.

Fishmarket 1: What's it Going to Be, Numbers? I Smell like Fish Every Day

This piece is inspired by Natali Blugerman's concept of the "Inverted Soundwalk." Usually, the practice sound walking is a way of moving through an environment while focusing on the sounds that we encounter. Although walking is a key part of the experience, the sound of the walker's footsteps themselves tends to be minimized, while the practice emphasizes horizontality. An inverted sound walk changes these elements, focusing primarily on the sound of our feet and the sounds at our feet, thereby emphasizing verticality. I think of it as a public, vernacular kind of Foley art, a footstep track for a film that could exist. This particular inverted soundwalk was recorded between 3:00 and 5:00 am in Ghent, Belgium in November of 2018 using a Sony PCM D-100.

Inverted Soundwalk 1: Untitled Flemish Noir

A late morning recording on a very still day at Evans Lake near Squamish in British Columbia. Recorded with a Shure VP88 and a Sound Devices 702.

Outside Squamish

Just as the title says, this is a recording of a salmon ladder as heard from four different positions nearby. The ladder is on the Mar Lodge estate in Scotland, and the sound was captured in June 2018 during the Murmurations field recording retreat. I used a matched pair of Sennheiser 8040 microphones in ORTF into a Sound Devices 702. Just for fun I made the sound into a little heartbeat at the end.

Four Perspectives On A Salmon Ladder

This is an early morning recording of a man sweeping the pews in Cologne Cathedral. It was recorded in September 2018 with a Sony PCM D-100.

The Pew Sweep Of Cologne Cathedral

This is a weird vibration I heard on a pier in the resort town of South Haven, Michigan during a walk on my birthday in November 2019. There were two semi-submerged, semi-revealed plastic pipes thumping and warbling as they took in water through concrete and ice. A little sonic treasure for a cold afternoon in the off season. Recorded with an iPhone 6, of all things.

Water Street Off Season

You've heard a million recordings of trains but this one's different. In March 2018 I got a pair of Sennheiser Ambeo headphones, which let you do some rudimentary binaural recording. I thought why not visit the old EMI factory and lab in West London -- now the "old vinyl factory" lofts, thanks gentrification -- where Alan Blumlein invented modern stereo recording in the 1930s. The trains recorded here are modern light rail, but I think they use the same rail lines as the trains that Blumlein and his team recorded in some of the first stereo films almost a century ago. Like all binaural recordings, you really need to wear headphones to get it properly. Recorded with an iPhone 6 and Sennheiser Ambeo headset. It was a Sunday and the site was still under construction at that time, you can hear a busted safety light buzzing.

Blumlein Blues

Everyone's making sourdough these days. It helps to quell the dread, doing something that requires methodical thinking, doesn't it? Sure. We were given a 24-year old starter from a generous friend. To add steps to an already elaborate multi-day process, I divided it into two batches -- named them Fred and Ginger -- that I fed with the same flour but different temperatures of water. To find out which was most active when it came time to make dough, I decided not to use my eyes or nose, but instead brought Fred and Ginger to my studio (currently a coffee table), where I used a JrF contact microphone and MixPre to record gaseous bursts, along with several barely perceptible disturbances in the jar lid. If you listen for a long time, you feel a little like you are inside slow dough bubbles in the levain. 
Anyway, on this particular day, it seemed to my ear that Ginger was more active than Fred. But then I felt bad for the old chap and in the end I decided to combine a little of each starter for the dough. This final stereo mix reflects the material combination, letting the two starter recordings dance together, Fred panned half left and Ginger panned half right. I run it here at 4x speed, I think it sounds best that way. Wear headphones.

Ginger and Fred

“Memorial” is a recording of 113 sirens recorded over nine nights from an alley-side stairway in Chicago, from May 24 to June 2, the days that span the de facto end of lockdown in our city and the beginning of the George Floyd and Breonna Taylor protests. I've layered the sounds over one another, no matter their duration, loudness or distance, in the order in which they were recorded, leaving nothing out. Besides cutting and layering, there is no other processing. Each siren begins a second or two after the one before, as when you sing a song as a round.

I taped every night, from evening until dawn (around 75 hours of tape) using a drop rig Sony A10 with mikroUši and windbubbles. This is a technique I had read about from recordist George Vlad. I intended to capture the way that, with street traffic and airplanes silent during the COVID lockdown, sirens dominate the soundscape of the city at night. There are several nursing homes and a COVID hospital nearby, and when we couldn't sleep we heard the ambulances pass, one after one, for months. I had wanted to set these ambulance sirens against long silences, to show how, denuded of all the ancillary everyday sounds, the skeleton of a sirenscape subtends Chicago's broad and rich urban soundscape.

But the project changed after the police murder of George Floyd on May 25. Over time, there were fewer ambulance sirens and more police sirens. The migratory morning birds captured in early recordings gave way to TV news helicopters and the sound of nearby demonstrations. The sirens, which had first transformed from urban noise to a memento mori, transformed once more, again becoming a sign of longstanding and ongoing police terror toward Black Americans. As I compiled these recordings, I kept thinking about how Floyd was alive when I began the project. Reflecting, I chose to adopt the layering structure in the recording in lieu of long silences, to emphasize a kind of horrible relentlessness.

Memorial aired as part of the Radiophrenia Festival in Scotland in November, 2020. It was also featured at the Audire festival exhibit in Portugal in April 2021. It won an Honorable Mention at the Sound of the Year Awards in the U.K. in the new Composed With Sound category.

Memorial

On the Ice Age Trail in Wisconsin there are a series of empty concrete shelters for hikers and backpackers. This is the sound of a summer wind echoing inside a shelter near Parnell Tower in the Northern Unit of Kettle Moraine State Forest. It was recorded with a Sony D-100 in July, 2020.

Ice Age Echo

Some audio of the calm between the sound of a tornado siren and the start of derecho winds that hit Chicago 8/10/2020. Recorded with a Sony D-100, while I hid with the kids in a closet, just in case.

Derecho

The sound of bugs in the hills above Prato, Italy, on the hottest day of the summer, 2018. Recorded with a Sony PCM D-100. A little handling noise in there, but you can handle it. Use headphones.

Under Tuscan Bugs

Here's a dawn chorus of birds I recorded during Murmurations, a field recording retreat in Scotland in 2019 hosted by Jez riley French and Chris Watson. It wasn't until I was going over the recording yesterday that I noticed the report of rifles (starting around 5:30), likely from grouse hunters, which rouses the sleeping local livestock. Recorded in ORTF using Sennheiser 8040 mics and a Sound Devices MixPre.

Waking Up The Neighbors

Icy swells on Lake Michigan after about a foot of snow fell over the weekend, Feb 1st 2021. Cold? Sure. Taken about 5:45 am at Montrose harbor, Chicago. Sound Devices MixPre II with Sennheiser 8040 ORTF rig, in case you are interested.

Ice Waves

Here's a recording I did of night barges on the Rhine, 4 AM one day in Winter 2018. Recorded with a Sony D-100.

Night Barge On The Rhine

Brief experimental field recordings, laboriously obtained, lightly processed.

Three Beacon Radio

Pinned to spotlight

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