Bandcamp hosts an amazing array of field recordings from around the world, made by musicians and sound artists as well as professional field recordists. In this column, we highlight the best sounds recorded outside the studio and released in the last month. This installment features a stolen recorder and a repeated waltz; a Virginian wildfire and a Swiss bell foundry; a Croatian church and a Dutch squatters’ commune.
Francisco López
Abducted Recorders [Cambodia & Sardinia]
Sometimes field recording goes wrong. And then, sometimes, it goes right again. Abducted Recorders features two examples of handheld recorders getting stolen and then recovered. Luckily, they were running at the time. In Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Francisco López left his recorder in a hotel’s private outdoor seating area. A night guard finds it and handles it, trying to determine its function. He leaves it for another five minutes only to return and take it away on his moped. Then, in Barega, Sardinia, López left a recorder in the grass by the road where a local man walking his dog found it. We hear him encounter the device and take it home to investigate further. It was only through López’s perseverance that he was able to track these recorders down again, and only through good fortune that they contained these funny and fascinating recordings of their own abductions.
Fred Gales & Walter Maioli
Javakade 8485
Vinyl LP, Cassette, Vinyl Box Set
The End of the World arrived on May 14, 1984. In the ‘80s, the edges of Amsterdam were full of abandoned buildings that the city’s squatters’ movement adapted to their own uses. They turned the shipyards of Java Island into a commune whose social center was Het Einde van de Wereld, or The End of the World, a restaurant, movie theater, and concert hall in one. Fred Gales and Walter Maioli recorded the activity in and around The End of the World in its first years and released this sound collage on cassette in 1985. They captured the conflicts and triumphs of the place, from an eviction of a squat to a film festival to concerts to pirate radio broadcasts. The situation couldn’t last: Java Island was gentrified in the ‘90s and The End of the World was forced to relocate to a boat in the harbor (where they still operate today). But this reissue revives the revolutionary spirit of the original location, serving as a welcome reminder of its thrilling energy and utopian vision.
Daniel Bachman
Quaker Run Wildfire (10/24/23–11/17/23) for Fiddle and Guitar
Since 2021’s Axacan, Daniel Bachman has become more and more invested in addressing climate change with his take on American Primitive guitar, incorporating field recordings from his Virginia home to illustrate its effects. Quaker Run Wildfire is the first of his music to be wholly dedicated to a single event: the 2023 fire that spread from Double Top Mountain throughout the region, eventually burning more than 4,000 acres. Bachman made recordings of the fire itself, the affected wildlife, the sirens, and the firefighters’ tools, like leaf blowers, that were used on the ground. He also took photos and videos of the fire, which he converted into audio files that create a glitchy digital effect. This long track follows the narrative of the crisis, from the wildlife reacting to the sirens bouncing off the hillsides, to the intensity of the roaring fire, to the November rain that finally extinguished it. Bachman’s titular fiddle and guitar are present throughout, but they are smeared and distorted by these other audio sources in a touching metaphor—humanity trying to express itself through the noise and the flames.
ILIOS
The tale of the Rüetschi foundry
Vinyl LP
In 2013, the Greek field recordist and sound artist ILIOS was invited to record in one of the oldest bell foundries in the world, the Rüetschi foundry in Aarau, Switzerland, founded in 1367. ILIOS has previously recorded in pachinko parlors, construction sites, and monasteries—anywhere that there is extreme and repetitive sound. These tracks provide a glimpse into the workings of the foundry—very dangerous-sounding machinery predominates—but there are tantalizing musical fragments scattered throughout. “Harono” is a bass-y drone that would fit well on an album by labelmates MMMD, and “Ninunó” features a dreamy arpeggiated synth. And of course the crystal-clear ringing of church bells appears and reappears, a delicate counterpoint to the busy mechanical furor of the foundry itself.
Virgilio Oliveira
Natural Sounds from São Tomé e Príncipe
This massive set consists of nearly three hours of field recordings from the African nation of São Tomé and Príncipe, two small archipelagos in the Gulf of Guinea. Virgilio Oliveira traveled its main islands, recording from the iconic Pico Cão Grande (featured on the cover), through the rainforests and to the beaches. There is no studio wizardry here, only crystal-clear recordings of beautifully lush environments. Rarely does a field recording transport you so utterly to another place. (No, those barking dogs in “Market of São Tomé” are not outside your window—I’ve checked several times.)
alëna korolëva
premonitions
Cassette
On premonitions, Alëna Korolëva adapts her background in documentary film to audio. She constructs a narrative out of a plethora of human, animal, and mechanical sources: a chorus of toads fades away into a coming storm, which transitions into harsh, screeching metal, which resolves into the whistling of a kettle. A friend duets on the trumpet with a group of swans before a swarm of bees overtakes them. Finally, all of these animals join in a frantic call amid a massive drone of truck horns, as if in a panic about something unseen—the premonitions of the album’s title. Sometimes funny, sometimes chilling, this is truly a short film in sound, with an ambiguous ending that requires repeated listens.
manja ristić & murmur
the scaffold
Compact Disc (CD)
Two of field recording’s most dedicated practitioners, Manja Ristić and Patrick McGinley, finally began their first collaboration at a particularly unpromising time: spring of 2020, right as the Covid-19 pandemic was beginning. Yet the project helped the duo through the initial lockdown, as the exchange of files between Metsküla, Estonia and Belgrade, Serbia gave them something to focus on outside of the confines of their homes. McGinley’s first offering was a recording of a scaffold installed on his apartment building, singing in the wind. It became a symbol for both of them of the beauty that can be found even in the most constricted circumstances. The second track was recorded after lockdown restrictions lessened and Ristić traveled to Dubrovnik, Croatia—too soon, as it turned out, because the crush of the tourist crowds led her to seek safety in a nearby church. There, she encountered priests practicing Gregorian chants, which became the centerpiece of “kaugpääs; antenn.” These two carefully constructed tracks are simultaneously haunting and hopeful, an artifact from a time of slow days and swift changes when connection, at whatever distance, provided a way through.
Pierre-Nicolas Colombat et Henri Colombat
Sept fois cis
For a week in August 2022, Pierre-Nicolas and Henri Colombat made one song the soundtrack to their lives. It was Chopin’s Waltz in C-sharp minor, op. 64 no. 2. Pierre-Nicolas played the composition every day on a different instrument, sometimes alone and sometimes in busy public places (“Nothing on the piano! Read the signs!” he jokes on Sunday’s recording). Meanwhile, Henri recorded himself biking through The Hague on different routes every day. These recordings were electronically manipulated and then interspersed with the piano pieces on Sept fois cis. As their lives progress day by day, we hear the waltz change slightly too, depending on the instrument and its context. Somehow, the song stays fresh across six iterations, as if we return to it with new ears after having explored the city streets.
Megzbow & Vinegar Tom
Field Mulch
Cassette
Field Mulch is—and I mean this as a compliment—like taking acid and swimming in a bog. The duo of Megzbow and Vinegar Tom specialize in warping recordings of their native Pembrokeshire, Wales into a nightmare version of its pastoral idyll. On their excellent debut from last year, Welsh Noise Vol. II, they stretched and twisted the sounds of livestock, log fires, and domestic cats until they would suit a John Carpenter film. Field Mulch is a live version of that album performed at London’s recently departed Iklectik. Not content to play it straight, Megzbow and Vinegar Tom added broken keyboards and dipped hydrophones into buckets of water, drenching the whole messy proceedings in an aquatic ambience. Just check the track titles: “Ronnie’s Wobble (Soggy Dub),” “Gong Bath (Submerged Dub),” “Sloshed Grandmother.” Jump in, the water’s fine, if a bit murky.
Eva-Maria Houben
finding some stuff
Compact Disc (CD),
As a member of experimental group the Wandelweiser collective, composer and organist Eva-Maria Houben flirts with silence, letting long tones fade away into, or small spectral sounds arise from, a static hum. “Music may exist ‘between’: between appearance and disappearance, between sound and silence, as something ‘nearly nothing,’” Houben is quoted in The New Yorker. In a long and prolific career, she has explored this idea with a range of instruments, ensembles, choirs, and orchestras. On finding some stuff, she continues her investigations with, well, stuff she has found: bits of metal and wood from old machines discovered in Bretagne, France. Nature sounds from Greece, The Netherlands, and Germany form the background of the piece, and organ tones drone over top. Each layer of the composition unfolds gradually, slowly revealing new depths in barely perceptible shifts. This creates a calm, contemplative atmosphere in which even the most mundane sounds (crows cawing, sirens in the distance) become major events. As with the best Wandelweiser pieces, finding some stuff can easily slip out of awareness, but it can just as easily return to dazzle with moments of rare beauty.
