more on field recordings...

"suddenly dissatisfied with the fluid form that had evolved in the fifth [symphony], he [sibelius] began to dream of a continuous blur of sound without formal divisions - symphonies without movements, operas without words. instead of writing the music of his imagination, he wanted to transcribe the very noise of nature. he thought he could hear chords in the murmurs of the forests and the lapping of the lakes; he once baffled a group of finnish students by giving a lecture on the overtone series of a meadow..."

alex ross on sibelius in the rest is noise.

before ipods and gameboys...

a group of family campers circa 1900, the youngest immersed in "new" technology...

when landscapes are free for ears...

i have a new sound work made with field recordings available at the soundwalk website/blog, here. it's an unusual piece for me, as i've used recordings of a woman singing and a man playing drums, so it is a bit more active and rhythmic than usual. the site is relatively new, and will continue to post new works in "edition" bursts. they have also recently posted works by aki onda, murmer, bj nilsen, yann novak, francisco lopez, radio mental, and others.

when saroyan asked if writers are worth listening to...

the january 1955 issue of high fidelity magazine featured a beautiful photograph of william saroyan, recording himself reading one of his own works (jim dandy), in his malibu home, with a view of the ocean. the photograph is connected to a story in the magazine where saroyan discusses the "value" of being able to listen to writers read their own works through recordings, and specifically LP recordings.

the bulk of the article is not super interesting, but there a few gems, including saroyan's affirmation of one of my own stronger beliefs towards making recordings with humble gear...

"my recording for columbia was done on my own machine in my own home in malibu. the machine isn't much, but there are good machines, and i am in favor of this procedure for writers, rather than the procedure which involves recording studios, technicians, signals, signals off, and the rest of it. technical deficiencies are balanced by naturalness. i tend to believe that the ideal record will be more than just a straight reading of a given piece of writing. it will be something of the writer himself. if this were not so, if the reading were the important thing, then it would be in order for a professional reader, or actor to attend to the matter."

when poets were like baseball players too...

a few weeks ago, i posted the artwork for a frank lloyd wright bubble gum card that was part of a set of famous americans from the early 1960's. a few days ago i remembered another bubble gum card anomaly... this 1934 "sky birds" bubble gum card of gabriel d'annunzio, pictured as a famous aviator, but on the back also referred to as the "poet flyer".

to the best of my knowledge, like wright the architect, d'annunzio was the only poet to appear on a bubble gum card.

when i discovered the card, years ago, i thought the poet simply shared a name with a famous WWI italian fighter, but d'annunzio seems to have led quite a complex life. the back of his short story collection "nocturne and five tales of love and death", tells the reader he was "flamboyant, unquestionably brave, eloquent, seductive - an inspirer and leader of men, astonishingly successful with women" (not exactly the usual bio of a poet born in 1863 and published by academic and university presses...).

i first came upon his work in the mid-1980's through the marlboro press, who published the short story collection mentioned above, as well as many great works in translation. it was through marlboro that i discovered writers like hermann broch and hans fallada. d'annunzio's short stories were great, but i remember having a deeper relationship with his dark novel of failed love, "the triumph of death".

according to the backs of both books, d'annunzio's work was championed by a number of great writers, including james joyce, eugenio montale, andre malraux, and paul valery, which probably means one could also add the phrase "writer's writer" to his already swollen biography.

here's a large fragment of a one of d'annunzio's longer poems, that i particularly like because of its relationship to listening and nature sounds...:

hush. on the edges
of the woods i can't
hear words
you say, human words;
but i hear newer words,
that drops of water and leaves speak
far away.
listen. it's raining
from the scattering clouds.
it's raining on the
brackish, burnt-up tamarisks,
it's raining on the
scaly, bristling pines,
it's raining on the divine
myrtles,
on the broom trees gleaming
with their clumps of flowers,
on the matty junipers
and their sweet-smelling pips,
it's raining on our sylvan
faces,
it's raining on our bare
hands,
on our thin
clothes,
on the fresh thoughts
which the mind uncovers
in her new freshness,
on the lovely fable
that yesterday
enchanted you, and today enchants me,

can you hear? the rain is falling
on the solitary
greenness
with a crackling that hangs
and varies in the air
with the thickness and the sparseness
of the greening.
listen. in reply
to the crying, the song of
cicadas
which the south-wind crying
cannot frighten;
nor can the ashy sky.
and the pine tree
has its sound, and the myrtle
has its sound, the juniper has
still another, diverse
instruments
under fingers without number.
and we
are immersed in forest
spirit,
living of wood livingness;
and your longing face
is wet with rain
like a leaf,
and your hair
smells like
shining broom flowers,
o earthly creature
name
hermione.

listen, listen. the chord
of airy cicadas
little by little
hushes
under the growing cry;
but now a song mixes in,
more raucous
than what rises from below,
from wet, distant shade.
hollower and hoarser
it grows weak, it dies.
alone one note
still trembles, dies,
rises, trembles, dies.
the voice of the sea cannot be heard.
and now on all the leafy branches
is heard to stream in torrents
the silver rain
that cleans,
the vast outpouring that varies
the thickness
and the sparseness
of the greening.
listen.
air's daughter
is silent; but the distant daughter
of the mud,
the frog,
is singing from the deepest shadows,
who knows where, who knows where!
and it's raining on your lashes,
hermione.

when music was made by solid rock...

many people have commented regarding a post i made last week about some folks in a cave listening to a radio, in relation to the luray caverns. i posted something about luray a long while ago, but have been unable to find that post through google's mysteriously unhelpful "search this blog" function.

so i set about looking for something in the real mess, and lo and behold i was able to put my hands on the 7" souvenir record from luray that not only has a beautiful cover, but some mysteriously wonderful music.(and i do believe it came into my possession from the collection of mr. bloggs, who runs the gregory ain park planned home blog)

here a bit of the liner notes:

the music on this record is made by solid rock. it comes from the great stalacpipe organ, only one of its kind inf the world, in the beautiful caverns of luray, luray virginia. deep in the caverns, in the walls of a large catherdral like chamber, stalactites are played like the pipes of an organ, producing musical tones that you hear on your record. stalactite after stalactite - those stony icicles and draperies hanging from the ceiling, have been turned by a grinding process to concert pitch. each one is equipped with a striking mechanism, a rubber tipped plunger that, fired by the impulse of an electric discharge, strikes the stalactite and brings forth a musical tone...making the recording was in itself something of an engineering feat. the microphone, like the listening audience, was centrally located and the music came from all sides. natural sounds, such as the splash of water dripping from the stalactites are an inevitable and interesting part of the record.

thanks to jeremey of ampersand etc. for reminding me and my feeble memory, that we dedicated a section of the book "site of sound" to the luray caverns organ, particularly deciding to include it because of its peculiar approach to site specific sound (and sounding). it is nice that the luray folks mentioned the natural dripping sounds in this recording on the sleeve, because it is a rare breed of instrument that can only be recorded as a field recording, not because of social reasons such as with rural or ethnographic recordings, but because the instrument itself exists in the world and is built of the world, and can only be heard within its natural soundscape.

click here to listen to the entirety of this little record.

when recording in snow...

some tips for recording in snow:

1. be careful if your contact mics are warm... if you place them on ice, they will stick to it, like your tongue on the inside of the refrigerator.

2. your baseball cap can work pretty good as an impromptu protective cover for your recorder if it starts snowing.

3. sometimes even in snow and cold, a dog will run up to your mics and try to lick them, perhaps thinking they are food or play toys...

natural sounds, desert hermits, and the sublime "nothing"...

while i was in marfa a few weeks ago, a friend of mine gave me a gift of the book 'the wisdom of the desert' by thomas merton. the body of the book is a series of texts written by desert hermits in egypt, palestine, arabia, and persia in the fourth century AD. i posted one about silence and a stone in the mouth a week or so ago. merton translated the "poems" (a bit like zen koans), and wrote a beautiful text of his own.

here's one of my favorite parts:

"the fruit of this was quies: "rest". not rest of the body, nor even fixation of the exalted spirit upon some point or summit of light. the desert fathers were not, for the most part, ecstatics. those who were have left some strange and misleading stories behind them to confuse the true issue. the "rest" which these men sought was simply the sanity and poise of a being that no longer has to look at itself because it is carried away by the perfection of freedom that is in it. and carried where? wherever love itself, or the divine spirit, sees fit to go. rest, then, was a kind of simple no-whereness and no-mindedness that had lost all preoccupation with a false or limited "self". at peace in the possession of a sublime "nothing" the spirit laid hold, in secret, upon the "all" - without trying to know what it possessed."

you are probably wondering what this has to do with the picture of the 7" i have posted here, containing the sounds of wildlife and nature, recorded at a nature reserve in florida in the mid 1970's. well, it's just one of those things i tend to find connections in, feeling the text and the sound bound together with a similar kind of pink string one binds together lawrence weiner's first dusk and last dawn stars. for some internal emotional reason they simply fit together, and this fitting just feels right.

the trajectory of "rest" that merton speaks of seems not only about a kind of peace within oneself, but also a kind of reckoning within oneself - a kind of cleansing before death. when one listens to the recording of "mountain lake sanctuary" one is immediately struck by the fervor of life, frantic, manic, and of course at the same time completely sublime. the goofy narration which i cut off of the beginning likened the various animals to instruments in an orchestra, but what if instead of instruments, each sound or animal was actually a mark or a moment in a timeline.

in this way, the recording could become a kind of narrative, with each sound as a kind of surrogate for a specific historical moment, so that the speed and order of sounds becomes an audio equivalent of a visual montage of someone's life (such as one of those scenes in a movie when someone's entire life passes before their eyes in a matter of seconds). listening in this way, allows a recording of nature to exist as a metaphor for the trajectory of a person moving towards the "rest" merton speaks of. certainly it is not too much of a stretch to hear such a path through this recording, particularly as one gets closer to the ending.

after being submerged in a cloud of natural sounds, one is confronted with a gentle surprise, which clearly signals a move towards no-whereness and no-mindedness. when the ethereal notes of a carillon drift into the picture, the whole thing moves from present to distant, fluctuating between the natural and supernatural (yes, it is quite a spirit-like presence). these last few moments of the recording feel as if a ghost has descended upon the scene, floated gently down to earth to tenderly hold one's hand, and to carry them off, as if floating, towards that same "sublime nothing" that merton speaks of.

click here to listen.

field recordings...

a text from lawrence halprin's notebooks, called elements of a natural landscape on a walk up camp tucker canyon 1961:

1. unpredictable rhythms - as arrangements through scatteration of trees.

2. relatedness of things - colors all related... brown range: fallen leaves, tree bark, earth etc., shapes etc.

3. small counter rhythms - leaves falling, branches moving.

4. sounds are quiet and persistent / unpredictable within a configurative pattern - as in the stream moving over rocks.

5. all edges are soft. they feel as though they become by being worn - not created into a fixed edge.

6. evolvement by either addition or subtraction of shapes - i.e erosion shapes or the additive shapes of growth (trees, leaves, falling, etc.).

7. non completion of spaces.. the spaces all move into other spaces and are non-configured.

8. variability of light - non-fixed and glowing.

9. the environment is pervassive - it enables you to come in and participate on your own level in any way you see fit. it does not impose many restrictions. limitations but not restrictions.