“On the 8th January 2025 I travelled to the Norwegian island of Andøya, in the Arctic Circle for a three week solo residency,” writes London-based musician Kit Grill in the text that accompanies his new album, Andøya. “Surrounded by sea, snow, and mountains, I lived in isolation and travelled around the island each day documenting the landscape. At 10am, the background light of the sun beneath the horizon would light the day and in the 4 hour window of light, I would hike into the mountains and explore the wilderness. It was a profound experience that changed the way I thought about sound, solitude, and what it means to be alone in nature.”

Andøya is the northernmost island in the Vesterålen archipelago in northern Norway, 300km inside the Arctic Circle. With a population of under 5,000, it was once one of Norway’s most important fishing outposts and an integral part of the indigenous Sámi people’s coastal culture. Now home to two space centres, it embodies many of the contradictions that have come to define remote Arctic regions - where wild nature, local history and technological infrastructure are layered through the landscape.

Having spent 6 months living on a small island in northern Scotland - home to just 30 people - and finding myself profoundly moved by the experience, I was curious to learn about Kit’s new project. Although the Isle of Muck where I had been was much smaller and far less wild (or snowy), I had come away with a sense that the only way I could really capture something of that time was through sound.

“Since returning,” Kit continues in the text, “I created a body of music informed by that time to try and capture the vastness and unpredictability of the Arctic landscape. The album moves through the sensory extremes: ice cracking, storms forming and fading, the rumble of tectonic plates, waves crashing, harsh winds, trudging through snow, and the sharpness of freezing air. The album aims to reflect both the landscape itself and the shifting emotions that came with living in isolation and the Arctic environment. The music and photography serve as a recorded diary of my time there, documenting the experience.”

How do you translate a sense of vastness, of empty space, isolation, loneliness, or even simply just cold, through sound? How do you work field recordings into compositions that will communicate something of that memory to those who weren’t there? How do you reconcile being a visitor, artist and recordist in an unfamiliar environment with your own practice?

Rather than a conventional Q&A, for this special Through Sounds post, Kit shared snippets from his diary and a selection of analogue photos that provide an intimate context to the music he created.

Day 1: After 3 planes leaving London at 9am, I arrived at Andenes airport at 7pm. Freezing. Collected car from Ola then went shopping at Rema 1000, bought logs and food for a few days. Drove across the island in the night to the cabin. Freezing wind when I got out the car, carrying all my bags to the cabin through the snow. It was a big wake up call how cold life can get. Definitely should have worn gloves.

Day 2: Very excited to wake up. Snow everywhere, low light. Magical colour. Drove around the island and explored what was nearest. Back at the cabin by 1:30pm. Pitch black, lighting a fire. A long night ahead.

Day 4: Climbed up a nearby mountain and hoping the sky clears. I decided to make a routine to get through my time to help give some structure to my days:

• Wake up

• Breakfast

• Drive, hike, take photos

• Go to cafe, supermarket

• Home by 2pm

• Work for 2 hours

• Exercise

• Dinner

Day 6: Booked in a sauna with the local husky owner. It’s been a few days without talking to anyone so will be good to speak with people. Isolation really makes you realise how much you take for granted being with people in ‘civilisation’.

Day 7: Explored the island, driving from west to east to a café. Thick fog, ice and low visibility made the drive dodgy but the car handled it well. Saw a wild otter and white rabbit - highlight of the day. Weather changed in the evening, getting warmer with low visibility. Lots of rain, fog, no light. Pretty tough conditions.

Day 8: Storm has arrived. High winds and lots of rain. Snow has melted. Hard to do much when it’s like this as visibility is so low and dark. Beginning to feel a big change of environment setting in.

Day 9: Earthquake tremor last night. Heard a huge bang / crack in the night. Thought something feel off the roof. Local news outlets reporting on it. Lack of light and not having regular conversation is tough. It’s reassuring to know locals struggle with lack of light too. Hoping for weather to get colder and snow to return. Bumped into a few locals, nice to have a chat. Walked up a beautiful mountain today, will go back tomorrow with snow.

Day 10: Aurora Borealis showed up :) Big change in weather and outlook. The local space station was also firing its laser’s into the sky. Looked crazy with northern lights and the lasers. Turns out there are twospace space stations here, Isar Aerospace and Andøya Space.

Day 11: Hiked another local mountain, good to see different perspective across the island. Aurora Borealis showed up again.

Day 12: Drove over the bridge to Eikeland. When I returned, I went for a walk around the coastline. Reflecting on how few people are here, the only people I see are when I go in to supermarket. I saw lots of eagles hovering above my walk today. Aurora Borealis showed up again, getting spoilt now :)

Day 13: Sun came up today. Beautiful to see, really makes you appreciate the sun. Starting to think about how I will translate this experience into sound, I have a few sketches started.

Day 14: Went to the local town and for a walk along local beach. Swear I saw another otter but they move so fast that you second guess yourself.

Day 15: Approaching the end of the trip. Excited to go whale watching, they showed up - amazing to see. Graceful and huge creatures. It was amazing to hear the whale sounds from the boat.

Day 16: Met the local huskies and spent a morning with them taking photos. It was lovely chatting with Will, a guy from Ireland who moved over here to be with his girlfriend. He has 7 Huskies and is hoping for consistent snow to get them out. There’s a beautiful one who is cross with a Siberian wolf (I think).

Day 17: Empty day, packing. Feels weird living as it’s become like normal living here.

Day 18: The time has come to leave. It’s sad to say goodbye. My biggest reflections are that travelling on your own is inspiring - you build a relationship with the landscape, live amongst it and have new experiences; and that it’s great to get away from the hyper modern busy life we can find ourselves in - It’s refreshing to be away from everything but hard at the same time. Lastly, to realise how important the sun is, the giver of life, without it can get very tough. It’s been a trip that’s had everything in and excited to see how I can translate this into music.

Kit Grill’s Andøya is out now via Primary Colours.

All photos courtesy of Kit Grill.

Sounds

Joshua Bonnetta

The Pines

(Shelter Press & The Dim Coast)

Thirty-eight minutes in and there is a rustling in the undergrowth. The muffled footsteps of a nondescript mammal rustle in the leaves. The pine wood creaks. A bird screeches. A rush and scuffle as the beast tumbles off into the distance. Edited from 8760 hours of audio recordings, sound artist and filmmaker Joshua Bonnetta’s latest project The Pines is an arboreal epic - a four-hour ecoacoustic suite capturing the year-long lifecycle of a pine tree in Tioga County, NY.

Using passive acoustic monitoring equipment strapped 10 metres up a tree trunk, the recordings are split into four hour-long seasons, stitched together to create a concentrated, continuous listening experience. Like many durational works, things really start to get interesting when you lose yourself in the recording and time begins to bend and stretch in unusual ways.

As much as The Pines points towards a slow and situated listening to the natural world without human interference, I found the cumulative experience almost psychedelic, as sounds, rhythms and moods drift in and out of focus, some impossibly close, others eerily distant as to almost be auditory hallucinations, impossible to pin to any single source. A simple idea, uniquely realised, The Pines is a beautifully open-ended work, realised at a scale few would be brave enough to undertake.

(Look out for an interview with Joshua about the work in the next few months here on Through Sounds.)

Being Strangers

Concrete Dreams of Sound

(Built Sound)

Concrete Dreams of Sound is rooted in a proposition: What could music be if it were made of architecture? Built from detailed spatial and acoustic recordings of the Barbican Centre in London, using instruments and sensors to capture airborne and structural vibrations that were then played back into the spaces they were recorded, Concrete Dreams of Sound exposes the sonic materiality inherent in the spaces and structures that surround us. Accompanied by Gascia Ouzounian’s textural violin playing, it offers a new aural perspective on a built environment that has long been an inspiration for artists, film-makers and photographers.

Various Artists

Afrosonica

(FLEE)

I’ve been aware of FLEE for several years now, and amid the great sea of reissues and archival projects, the Paris-based label have always stuck out for their attention to detail and ethnographic engagement with the music they release. Teaming up with the MEG (Museum of Ethnography) in Geneva, this latest project brings together the four artists commissioned for the exhibition Afrosonica - Soundscapes. Released alongside a hardback book exploring the ideas behind the project, KMRU, Midori Takada, Yara Mekawei, and Ntshepe Tsekere Bopape (Mo Laudi) begin to chip away at reframing the Western-centric notion of the archive, and the often racist anthropological research that underpinned it. KMRU’s piece in particular knits together a collage of sonic materials and trajectories that jar and provoke through juxtaposition.

Andrew Pekler

New Environments & Rhythm Studies

(Faitiche)

I’ve referred back to Andrew Pekler’s Phantom Islands over and over again since I came across it a few years ago, both as a piece of interactive design and series of speculative compositions, imagining the sounds of islands lost in the mapping and remapping of the world over several centuries. Sonically at least, New Environments & Rhythm Studies feels like it is drawing from the same well, full of equal parts unsettling and compelling atmospheres crafted from synthetic, looped or manipulated field recordings (such as crickets and other insects), that “attempt to re-describe past tropes which laid claims to authentically represent music and sound from beyond the Western world (exotica, ethnomusicology, field recording) as undertakings of the imaginary.”

Khaled Kurbeh

Likulli Fadāin Eqāéh لكلّّ فضاءٍٍ إيقاعه

(Research Records)

With a title that translates as ‘to each space its own rhythm’, Berlin-based Syrian musician Khaled Kurbeh’s new album is a striking electro-acoustic work with its own internal architecture - at times expansive and speculative, at others densely textured, and intricately detailed. Drawing on field recordings (swallows, sunflower seeds among others) and elements of musique concrete, each track feels like its own kind of mnemonic device, taking its place within the broader landscape hinted at in the album’s bold artwork.

Morgan Szymanski & Tommy Perman

Songs for the Mist Forest

(Blackford Hill Audio)

A record that extends guitarist Morgan Szymanski and artist Tommy Perman’s soundtrack to documentary film El Dragón de los Bosques de Niebla (The Dragon of the Mist Forest), which follows ongoing ecocide in the Valle de Bravo in Mexico where overdevelopment is threatening the survival of native Abronias reptiles. Weaving Szymanski’s acoustic guitar lines with field recordings from the Valle de Bravo, it offers an emotive response to a local environmental crisis that could speak for so many other conservation challenges around the world.

Various Artists

mɜː.məˈreɪ.ʃən #5 - transmit

(Murmurations)

Emerging from a listening and recording residency run by Jez Riley French in Glenshee, Scotland, last year’s iteration of Murmurations gathers around the idea of transmission, “ from remote streaming, to spoken scores in-situ, and to thinking about how sound history is communicated…or rather, how it has been and can be.” The subsequent release features 26 tracks made by the participants and spans a huge breadth of ideas and approaches. You can find out more about the 2025 Murmuration here.

Wampís of Guayabal & Aboutface

Los Bosquesinos

(Coordinates)

A sensitively produced collaboration between UK-based artist Aboutface and indigenous Wampís forest community living in the Peruvian Amazon. Based on collaborative recordings made during a month Aboutface spent living with the Wampís, the album’s four tracks are improvisations on Nampets - ancient songs sung from the perspective of animals living in their rainforest environment. All sales revenue from the project will go to the Wampís to support indigenous-led conservation initiatives against illegal deforestation and ecocide.

Qasim Naqvi

Endling

(Erased Tapes)

An endling is the final member of a species. On his new album for Erased Tapes, Pakistani-American composer Qasim Naqvi takes a modular journey into the future to narrate the story of the last living human. A piece of speculative world-building - or world dismantling - the album accompanies its protagonist “through the crumbling landscape of the future … now being overtaken and absorbed by the natural world.” Testing boundaries between organism and machine, Endling is a sophisticated and layered record, and an imaginative response to the spectres of extinction and species loss which haunt our present.

Asher Levitas

Peripheral Lands

Sound artist Asher Levitas draws inspiration from Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain for a four-track investigation of sonic ecologies, both above and below the water line. Threading each composition with field recordings that reject binaries of nature and culture, Levitas allows for the sounds of bat echolocation calls, fish respirations or static electrical charges to lead the mood and rhythm of each piece. Levitas also has a new album out now called I Wish We Could Tell You Everything, which you can find here.

to you they are birds, to me they are voices in the forest

June 7th Pt. 1 & 2

(Vibrant Matter)

A live release by newly formed Bergen-based duo Daiyen Jone Castro and Knut Jonas Sellevold, this short-run cassette release takes a subtle and meditative journey through a verdant, imaginary environment. This is improvised, visually evocative music that treads a fine line between critical field recordings and post-natural aesthetics. If you like flutes and ambient electronics, then this one is definitely for you.

Machine Listening

Environments 12

(Futura Resistenza)

Between 1969 and 1979 sound recordist Irv Tiebel oversaw the production of an 11-album series called Environments featuring field recordings and natural soundscapes that contributed to the creation of what is now a booming nature-based mood music economy. First created as an 8-channel sound installation, Environments 12 is a speculative twelfth edition in the series which “unfolds across a series of historical, contemporary, and speculative scenes, narrated by an ensemble of vocal performers and their generative voice clones.” Delivered from the vantage point of an altered nature, it’s a fascinating engagement with both the idea of sonic environments and human obsession with capturing and repackaging them.

Books & reading

Following their collection of feminist sound writing Bodies of Sound, Silver Press have recently republished Anna Carson’s 1995 essay The Gender of Sound, which is a fascinating and digestible exploration of the ways in which utterances are deemed either acceptable or hysterical, deviant or conformist within patriarchal Western society. It’s short and snappy and knitted together by Carson’s wonderful prose.

Other bits of reading to recommend include an essay by Shzr Ee Tan on the sonic regimes of domestic workers in southeast Asia; an interview on sound and power with artist and Earshot founder Lawrence Abu Hamdan in Frieze; a wide-ranging meditation on Aura Satz’s Preemptive Listening and the sonic politics of emergency published by Liquid Architecture; and, if you pick up a copy of this month’s Wire magazine, a short piece by me on contemporary bells.

Exhibitions

The Wellcome Collection currently has an exhibition called 1880 THAT, featuring works by Christine Sun Kim and Thomas Mader that explores sign language, the right to communicate and “the idea of language as a home - an essential place of belonging - and what it means to live with the threat of losing one's language.”

Given the relevance to this newsletter it’s worth also pointing to Barbican’s new show ‘Feel the Sound’, which makes the point that we listen with more than just our ears. A simple idea, it brings together work by lots of artists and practitioners I really admire - Evan Ifekoya, Jan St. Werner, Ryuishi Sakamoto, Yuri Suzuki, Holly Herndon and Cities & Memory - in a way that sadly makes it difficult to really engage with them on a meaningful level. In one short film Dame Evelyn Glennie asks us to “trust that in the quiet spaces real connection and understanding can emerge”, but jammed together in the resonant and high-ceilinged Curve, that simply isn’t possible. It’s shame because this feels like a missed opportunity to engage a much wider audience with some fantastic sound work.

Another sound-focussed exhibition running this summer is Nottingham Contemporary’s Your Ears Later Will Know To Listen, which draws on methods of “foraging” and “disfiguration” from cultural historian Saidiya Hartman’s writing (for anyone unfamiliar, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments is a great place to start) to consider “how sound travels and transitions through cross-cultural identities, histories, and futures.” I’ve not been yet, but the premise of listening back to uncover lost histories hints at the more radical and empancipatory potential of sound and a nuanced exploration of the positionality of the listener. Expect new commissions from Satch Hoyt, Raheel Khan and Dylan Robinson (who is speaking at CRiSAP on 4th July), alongside works by Nguyễn Trinh Thi, Hong-Kai Wang, Simnikiwe Buhlungu and more.

Back in London, there are some great aquatic events upcoming at Microscope in Dalston this month - starting with the Office of Slow Tides - a residency by artists Sonia Levy, and Kirsty Badenoch, between the 23rd and 26th June, and followed by the launch of Chasing Water, an exhibition by ETH Zurich’s DELUS Journal for Landscape and Urbanism Studies, on Thursday 3rd July.

Films

Finally, two beautiful, speculative and highly original documentaries to recommend this month. First up, Eleanor Mortimer’s exploration of deep sea taxonomy ‘How Deep is Your Love’, complete with fascinating selection of sea cucumbers and a healthy dose of Herzogian anthropology. And secondly, a strikingly shot and poetic film by Jeffrey Zablotny visiting three subterranean telescopes in remote regions of Canada, Japan, and Antarctica. Although focussed on different environments, they share an interest in depth - both physical and metaphysical - and the limits of what we can know about the world.

Last autumn I was asked to join a panel of judges for the Sound of the Year Awards, an annual initiative organised by the Radiophonic Institute to celebrate the best sound recordings of the last 12 months. The awards are divided into nine categories: best natural sound, disappearing sound, composed with sound, sound of the city, best imagined sound, best sound innovation, most unpleasant sound, children’s category and the coveted sound of the year itself.

Last week, the winners were announced, and tomorrow (Thursday 28th May, 8pm BST), I’ll be joining Radiophonic Institute’s Ilia Rogatchevksi on Resonance FM to chat about this year’s awards (you can listen back to the show here). As he told me earlier: “It's impossible to capture the sonic signature of the year that would satisfy all listeners. However, I see the 'sound of the year' not just as an awards initiative but an exercise in sympathetic and inclusive listening. Critically engaging with these sounds brings us closer to the lived experiences of other people, animals and living beings that inhabit this beautiful and troubled planet.”

You can listen to all the winners in full here, and read a few of my reflections on the listening and judging process below.

How do you judge one sound over another? By what criteria do you make that decision? Do you treat a sound as a discrete object and listen to it on its own terms? Do you take into account the quality of the recording? Or consider the environmental context it evokes, the political story it tells? Sound is never just sound alone. Listen too closely and it begins to dissolve and lose its meaning, like a photo under the light. “Sound,” anthropologist Tim Ingold argues, “is not the object but the medium of our perception.” It is a door to something else. Perhaps that which I enjoyed most about listening to all the entries was the way in which being asked to make a value judgement forced me to ask questions of my own listening.

I was assigned the “Best Natural Sound” category alongside two other judges. From a shortlist of 16 entries we were tasked with ranking a top 3. The scales and locations of these recordings differed dramatically, from ant colonies to lava flows, Polish wetlands to Peruvian rainforests. Each recording had a personal story, a reason why someone thought it to be the most important recording of the year, and in that sense there was simply no way of judging one to be objectively better than another. Instead, I tried to listen simply to how it made me feel. A recording of cranes panting in Sweden was so vibrant, strange and absurd I couldn’t help but laugh. In a recording of indigo macaws from a gorge in Brazil, I felt the reverberations and echoes of the geological environment. In the stridulations of an ant colony, a sound that I’d simply have no access to hearing in any other context.

There were impressive examples of acoustic ecology, recordings from the frontiers of deforestation and glacial calving, whale songs and insect choruses, individual species and complex soundscapes. As I listened, I began to specify my criteria a little more. Could the sound communicate something without context? Did it provide a new perspective on the natural environment? Was there something uniquely acoustic (or acoustically unique) about the recording? And did it relate in some way to the climate crisis and its wider political resonances? Aware that natural sound recordings can no longer really be read without a subtext of loss, I wanted to lean as much as possible away from grief and towards wonder.

The recording I ended up choosing, and which, somewhat serendipitously ended up being the recording all three judges agreed on, was a recording made by Ellie Williams of elephant seals on Sealion Island in the Falklands. More than that, these recordings suggested for the first time that, against the deafening backdrop of the Atlantic Ocean, elephant seals can, like elephants, sense seismic vibrations. Using geophones to record their earth-bound communication, Williams captured something extraordinary that has shifted our understanding of this specific corner of the natural world, while making the case more broadly for sound as something that far exceeds our limited, primarily aural listening.

Ellie Williams - Seismic Elephant Seal, Sealion Island (Best Natural Sound)

As well as the ‘Best Natural Sound’ category, I was also invited to submit my choice for the overall Sound of the Year, which would then be aggregated from the votes of all the judges. This, to me, seemed in essence a simpler task. The Sound of the Year should be as much about the sound as it is about the year. And the inescapable, awful, relentless noise of the last 12 months and beyond - in both a literal and a more symbolic sense - has been that which continues to eminate from Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza and the bombardment of Lebanon in the autumn of 2024.

There has been increasing documentation of the sonic impact of these conflicts - whether in first-hand journalistic accounts or this recent short film on Gazan sound engineer Mohammed Yaghi - which begin to provide some perspective on the visceral terror that the conflict reigns down in collateral. As Yaghi says in the clip linked above, “the monster that never leaves us alone is the drone.”

But hearing the entries for sound of the year - many of which were recorded on the front line of conflicts, protests and climate crises - was often a jarring experience. Sound can bring you closer to a specific location or experience, but it can also emphasise distance, especially when the contexts in recording and listening take place are so different. There is a privilege to listening alone, at home, which is far removed from those who were hearing, and continue to be tyrannised by these sounds in person.

The recording which was chosen for Sound of the Year was made by Alexandre Mitri and was called Drones and Strikes. It captures two drones and an airstrike over Lebanese capital Beirut in November 2024. It documents sound not only as an effect but as a weapon of psychological warfare that has been ongoing since long before the recent flare in conflict. According to sonic human rights organisation Earshot, there have been 22,355 illegal Israeli aerial violations on Lebanese airspace between 2007 and 2022, many of which were made by quadcopter drones. Where images no longer register, sounds like these are impossible to ignore.

Alexandre Mitri - Drones & Strikes (Sound of the Year)

Head over to the Sound of the Year Awards website to listen to winners from all nine categories, and tune in to Resonance FM on Thursday 28th May from 8pm if you’re interested to hear more about the idea behind the initiative.

I have decided to share it five years on, not because it is a finished piece but because it also documents my process in getting to grips with using a field recorder for the first time. The recordings are crude and I really struggled with the wind (hang in there beyond day 4, I promise it improves), but heard with the benefit of hindsight, it also speaks to me about memory, beginnings and cycles of change that unfold over time frames bigger than those I understood in the moment.

During the weeks when I was making these recordings, I was also working through Cathy Lane and Angus Carlyle’s collection of interviews In The Field, reading an interview with a different practitioner every day, writing out quotes, reflecting on my own process and noting down the weather on the day of each recording. Here is an extract from the introduction, which I read before recording on the first day:

--

Day 1: Thursday 5^th March, 2020

“Is the recordist an audible presence? Are they a silent participant who nonetheless provides some experiential authenticity, or at least takes responsibility for pressing “record” and then “stop”? Or is the recordist understood to be of relative insignificance compared to the dynamic properties of the scenes itself?” – Introduction, Lane & Carlyle

“If field recording is anything it involves an acceptance of the shifting circumstances of the world, the sudden, the gradual, the dynamic detail that duration reveals.” – Introduction, Lane & Carlyle

As the recordist, you must let go of your ideas of how the scene around you “should” sound, your preconceptions about what makes an “accurate”, “exciting” or “evocative” recording, and allow what exists in that moment to come to you. You must try to avoid imposing conditions or requirements on the recording, just as sketching is about freeing yourself from what you think you should be seeing (“an arm looks like this”) and capturing what’s actually there (“the angle of the arm”). The latter, although not always obviously descriptive, will always provide a more accurate representation.

“You can imagine a landscape where there are lots of things going on – such as different points on a map, for example – so when you are recording you are, in a sense, travelling through the map with these different locations and the composing then becomes the microphone’s movement through space.” – Andrea Polli, interviewed by Angus Carlyle (19)

So, what does that mean for a static microphone? Mapping the sound as it comes to you. There is an audible field, with boundaries to each recording, which extends in a radius of X from the microphone. Only that which enters this space will be captured.

How do you relate to wind? Wind is ever-present, but creates such static on the microphone as to obscure all other sounds. Should the recordist be actively monitoring and mitigating the intrusion of the wind into the recording (i.e. modifying the sensitivity of the mic in real time) or by framing win as an intrusion at all, the recordist is bringing their own preconceptions to the accuracy of the sonic environment, and unduly interfering with what is there? It is possible that the effect of the wind on the mic is exposing the limitations of the technology, in that, to the human ear, wind does not obscure all other sound in the way it does when rushing through the microphone. Should the recording be truer to the mic or the human ear? Probably the latter? And in mediating the recording of wind, the recordist inserts themselves into the act of documentation, in order to try and capture the environment in a fashion as close to their experience of it.

Conditions:

- Largely sunny, with a gentle breeze. Generally calm, although the breeze carries a chill.

- Isle of Eigg is clear, with soft blue sky and white clouds.

- The snow-capped peaks of Skye visible beyond Eigg, shrouded partially in cloud.

I didn’t intend January to be the Antarctic month on Through Sounds, but it makes sense. While researching for my ice cores audio documentary in the autumn, I spent an afternoon in the British Library diverted by a quest to find details of the first sound recordings made in Antarctica. Although not hugely reliable, consensus seemed to point towards the Scotia expedition of 1902, whose logbook I called up from the vaults and spent several hours poring through for evidence of those elusive recordings.

21^st September 1903: “As we stood on the top of Delta Island, a gentle, farm-like sound came up to us from the floe, the gurgling throat-sound of the mothers rather resembling the soft cackling of ducks and hens, and the bleating of baby seals like the bleating of lambs, while mixed with this was a gentle lowing like that of oxen far away. These gentle sounds – musical I should call them – were the only ones that broke the silence, as we stood enraptured with the beautiful scene that lay before us.”

William Speirs Bruce had reason to be in a reflective mood. Eleven days earlier, the captain of the Scottish National Antarctic expedition had taken into his care a Weddell seal pup, like the one whose bleating broke the silence on that pale polar evening. Weddell seals were usually high on the Antarctic menu, alongside shags and penguins, but this one Bruce had earmarked for something else. “I am keeping it alive to try for a good half-plate photograph tomorrow,” he wrote on 10^th September 1903. “And, if possible, to phonograph its voice, which is very human.”

Alongside the crew and an array of scientific instruments to chart the topography, biology and geology of Antarctica, the Scotia had been furnished with a phonograph and thirty or forty records which were “faithfully ground out” on concert evenings under the starless sky and “seldom failed to arouse applause.” Tales of trips into the endless white are often accompanied by memories of the estrangement of its silence. In his writing on snow, Tim Ingold noted that “wind unaided makes no sound”, and in Antarctica there tends to be a lot of wind and not a lot else. My friend at British Antarctic Survey Dieter Tetzner described the sensation of wind without noise in similar terms: “You can feel a lot of wind, but there's nothing to create sound, and that is very impressive. It's like seeing a car crash but with noise cancelling headphones.” No doubt the music of the phonograph was a welcome relief, familiar and grounding.

[A phonograph was also packed into the hold of Scott’s famous 1910 Terra Nova expedition, as a gift from His Master’s Voice, whose logo the crew had tried to emulate in the snow, seen in the main image of this post.]

As well as the phonograph, the Scotia also welcomed a man named Gilbert Kerr, 32 years old, from Edinburgh, whose job title in the crew list at the front of the logbook was “ordinary seaman, laboratory assistant, piper”. A safe pair of hands who could wield a set of bagpipes to raise the spirits whenever morale was low, a photograph of Kerr in full Highland dress playing the pipes to a penguin became one of the first postcards to be sent from Antarctica. On the crew’s return to Scotland, the bagpipes were given to 1^st Edinburgh Battalion of the Royal Scots, where they were played by Piper Anderson during the Battle of the Somme and subsequently lost to the fog of war.

It was not unusual for expeditions in the so-called “Heroic Age” of Antarctic exploration to employ the services of musicians. There is a woodcut of Japanese musician Keiichi Tada playing the shakuhachi (a traditional Japanese bamboo flute) to crew of the Japanese Antarctic Expedition in 1910–1912, while the Terra Nova also made room for Russian Anton Omelchenko who brought with him a balalaika (a long- necked lute with a triangular body).1 What was more unusual was that the phonograph which William Speirs Bruce and the Scotia expedition of 1902 had on board came with a handful of blank shellac discs and, like Bruce’s half-plate camera, the intention to record and contribute to the sum of human knowledge about Antarctica. And so it came to be that Gilbert Kerr the piper ended up playing second fiddle, so to speak, to the seal pup that Bruce had adopted on the 10^th September 1903.

13^th September 1903: “He yawns with a prolonged sighing note, and cries “Ma” remarkably like a baby,” noted Bruce, who had taken to the creature so much as to christen him “Phoca”. He details a laborious evening routine whereby Bruce would feed Phoca powdered milk by spoon - first Nestlé and then non-Nestlé varieties, as the former was not to Phoca’s taste. It was a task which became increasingly difficult as the seal grew.

19^th September 1903: “She is becoming quite a pet. I like her very much, in spite of the fact that she has bitten me four times on my left arm and both hands, in her effort to resist feeding, which is, after all, entirely a violent operation.”

Earlier that day, after several false starts, Bruce finally managed to make the phonograph recording he had been aiming for. “Before feeding her in the evening we got her to speak in the phonograph,” he wrote. “The result was remarkably successful.” The entry continues, somewhat dryly: “The piper also played a selection for another record; that result was also satisfactory.” Not exactly a glowing review for poor old Gilbert Kerr.

I have tried to find evidence of this recording of Phoca beyond the Scotia’s logbook, but so far been unsuccessful. However, like many of the natural sound recordings made over the following century, there is something both hopeful, elegiac and destructive about this story.

The following day, on 20^th September 1903, Phoca was beset by violent convulsions “evidently arising from abdominal troubles” - almost certainly as a result of the milk he had been fed by Bruce and the crew. Despite two additional doses of potassium bromide, “she slept all the afternoon, but her heart was getting weaker, and at 7.35pm the poor creature was dead,” Bruce wrote. The first natural sound recording made in Antarctica was also the last thing that poor Phoca gave to the world. Something taken, something lost. When Bruce stood at the top of Delta Island the next day, he would have been all the more sensitive to the bleating of baby seals rising up from the floe beneath.

The rest of Bruce’s accounts of the Scotia expedition, which returned to Scotland in 1904 having become trapped in pack ice in the Weddell Sea, is peppered with accounts of photographs and phonograph recordings. One more stands out.

19th October 1903: “Brown, Rossie, Willie, and cook went out and got a crateful of penguins for the phonograph, which I tried for them in the evening, as well as for the piper. It was not very successful but afterwards I shaved a record, and produced a much better result, though the penguins were less lively.”

And then a few lines later:

“The piper is becoming a proficient skinner.”

“Understanding climate change can be a problem of temporal perspective,” explains ice dynamics and paleoclimate scientist Dr Dieter Tetzner. “You have to think in timeframes of thousands of years, of tens of thousands of years, of hundreds of thousands of years.” I’m in headquarters of the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge. There is a conference about the “Doomsday Glacier” going on upstairs, but Dieter and I are down in the ice core lab, where columns of snow from by-gone millennia are being melted, piece-by-piece. Drilled from the ice sheet in cylinders (known affectionately in French as ‘carottes de glace’, or ‘ice carrots’), ice cores are formed of compacted snow and trapped air bubbles that contains atmospheric information about the temperature of the planet, from the present at the surface to the distant past nearer the bedrock.

“It's basically a time machine,” Dieter says. The deeper you dig, the further back you go. Volcanic ash, atomic radiation, phytoplankton, micrometeorites and now microplastics all appear in the ice. Such is the spike in nuclear matter frozen into the ice before the Test Ban Treaty in 1963 that scientists use it as a timestamp. “It's like reading a book,” Dieter continues, although you could also call it a charge sheet. “Each of the pages, each of the layers that we can analyse in the ice brings information about the story of the climate on the planet.”

So far, ice cores have narrated 800,000 years of continuous information about planetary temperature fluctuation - mapping eight ice ages, roughly one every 100,000 years - and its relationship to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution roughly 200 years ago, levels of CO2 measured in the ice have rocketed far beyond anything seen in the last 800,000 years. The research here makes that pretty clear. We are now just waiting for the temperatures to catch up.

Last year I visited Dieter at the BAS offices in Cambridge several times, first to learn about ice cores and then to make an audio documentary for Short Cuts, which was aired on BBC Radio 4 in late December as part of an episode called ‘Earth’. The piece is called ‘Melt Tones’ and it explores the relationship between climate change and deep time through the sound of an Antarctic ice core.

You can listen to ‘Melt Tones’ on the ‘Earth’ episode of Short Cuts here.

Alongside Dieter’s interview, all the sounds featured were recorded inside the ice core laboratory at BAS in Cambridge, many inside the -25c degree walk-in freezer where Dieter and his colleagues melt the ice under controlled conditions. You need to wear a padded jumpsuit and snow boots to enter. I had to leave my Zoom microphone in the fridge for 30 minutes before entering to prepare it for the cold; the batteries lasted less than an hour; the wires froze into solid rods; and everything had to be sealed in a plastic bag before leaving the freezer to avoid the accumulation of condensation which would then freeze on re-entry. I was only in suburban East Anglia, but I’ve never had to record under such challenging conditions.

Short Cuts is by virtue concise, but after spending time with Dieter, I ended up with several hours of conversation which could not be included in the 8-minute audio documentary. I’m hoping to publish more of this interview in the coming weeks here which, although not all related to sound, offered some fascinating and imaginative insights about Antarctica and how we map, record or archive our impact on the planet.

I’d also like to say thank you to Andrea Rangecroft at Falling Tree Productions for commissioning and helping me put together the piece, and Dieter and his colleagues at BAS for letting me poke around with my microphones while they worked.

I hope you enjoy the episode, and if you’re not familiar with it, do check out the incredible archive that Short Cuts have built up over the last twelve years. In late 2024, the BBC announced they would be discontinuing the series, which is both very sad and seriously short-sighted, given how few spaces there are for adventurous audio on the BBC and the role the series has as a springboard for first-timers like myself. You can still sign an open letter to the BBC concerning the decision which currently has over 1,500 signatories, and articulates better than I can what an impact this series has had. The final Short Cuts episode, ‘Midnight’, aired yesterday.

If you’d told me in December 2019 that five years later I’d be writing a newsletter post about - among other things - soil, I would not have believed you. Back then, I was just wrapping up the “albums of the year” lists for the magazine I was editor of and thinking more about Google Analytics than bioacoustics. My knowledge of environmental sound didn’t get much beyond a detached appreciation of Bernie Krause, whose Great Animal Orchestra had been exhibited by the arts organisation I worked for, and with whom I’d commissioned an interview for the magazine. I suppose in December 2019 there was a lot we didn’t see coming.

Anyway, here we are. One of the positive things about being new to a subject is the enthusiasm that comes with inexperience, and over the last few years, what began as a casual interest has transformed into a casual obsession. What in 2019 seemed to me like an impossibly niche pursuit has fragmented into endless corridors of inquiry leading to rooms upon rooms of research, each of which seem to contain further doors to open and explore. When I was writing my master’s thesis about ocean noise pollution a few years later, I remember encountering the phenomenon of snapping shrimp for the first time only to find dozens if not hundreds of papers and articles on the subject. That year, rather than go to Notting Hill Carnival or We Out Here, I was in the library reading about the “acoustic behaviours of large crustaceans in NE Atlantic coastal habitats”.

Perhaps the hardest thing about the literature review I was writing at the time was that the bioacoustics research I was trying to keep on top of was multiplying more quickly than I could keep up with. I have no stats to hand to back this up, but as technology improves and applications vary, I’m sure the field is continuing to proliferate exponentially.

I still get the Google Alerts that I set up at the time and make a note of the stories that interest me, partly because I fancifully intend to cover them in this newsletter. Some - like the discovery of a whale alphabet - have made it in, but most have not. So, in lieu of the end-of-year albums lists I spent much of the 2010s writing, I thought I’d share my highly subjective and incomplete survey of the developments in bioacoustics in 2024, starting with - you guessed it - soil.

(Maybe it’s worth saying that I use the term ‘bioacoustics’ here in the broadest possible sense and not always entirely accurately, mainly because I find that the debates surrounding delineations of bio- and eco-acoustics, acoustic ecology, soundscape ecology etc. etc. etc. can get in the way of what is actually interesting about the work being done and how it relates to contexts beyond the world of sound.)

“It’s a bit like going to the doctor,” ecologist Dr Jake Robinson says. “They put a stethoscope on your chest, take a health check, listen to your beating heart … we’re doing something similar in the soil.” Research conducted by at Flinders University in Australia found that sound recordings of soil are an effective way to monitor the health and biodiversity of underground ecosystems, returning simpler and more accessible results than traditional sampling methods. It’s a subject about which I spoke earlier this year to artist-researcher Juan Cortés, whose work looks at the impact of soy monocultures on Colombian soil health. Our interview will be published in Sonic Acts’ Ecoes magazine in January, and Cortés’ work will be featured in a forthcoming Somerset House exhibition in London appropriately called SOIL: The World at our Feet.

On a similarly microscopic level, there have been significant advancements in the use of bioacoustics for monitoring the health and abundance of insect populations in the face of climate change and pesticide use. Like many acoustic fields, automated listening - the training of AI models to identify and classify species within a soundscape - is accelerating the analysis of vast amounts of acoustic data.

On a much larger scale, AI models are being developed at ecosystem level to monitor rainforest health in close to real-time, the largest study of which was taking place in Costa Rica, as reported by New Scientist. Earlier this year, I visited the Colección de Sonidos Ambientales, or Environmental Sound Archive at the Humboldt Institute in Colombia, whose collection is being used to train AI models at various scales, one if which - called Project Guacamaya - is concerned with the use of bioacoustics in monitoring deforestation in the Amazon. More on this next year.

For anyone interested in the use of bioacoustics for conservation, I really recommend this paper by Max Ritts and Karen Bakker, who ask important questions about “conservation acoustics” in the context of Big Tech and the implications of using sound as data in the service of economic or political agendas.

Just as Juan Cortés’ work looks at the impact of agriculture on soil soundscapes, so has new research found that invasive plant species change the nature of the soundscapes into which they are introduced. While this has been more widely studied in relation to changes in animal populations (we’re looking at you, bullfrog), the study of how plants alter the soundscape may offer a new dimension through which to study patterns of environmental change. I was also interested to read this strident - and perhaps controversial - paper questioning the veracity of acoustic communication in plants, suggesting that while plants do respond to acoustic stressors, there is currently no evidence that they can perceive the sounds they make.

I may be wrong, but it feels like this is part of a wider questioning of concepts such as the ‘wood wide web’ (popularised by writers like Peter Wohlleben, Richard Powers and Merlin Sheldrake), which have captured the public imagination, but whose stories might be outpacing the science. As this piece by Daniel Immerwahr argued in April, “it’s worth asking what makes us so eager to ascribe human qualities to the arboreal world. Might we be missing something important when we gaze into the wooden mirror and see only ourselves?”

That said, soundscape analysis has been succesfully applied to underwater plantlife, where it is now understood to be an effective tool for monitoring seagrass restoration. “A successful restoration action should lead to acoustic restoration and soundscape ecology could represent an important component of restoration monitoring,” the authors write, following up on research in 2021 that seagrass suffers damage from extreme noise, impacting its capacity to adequately store carbon.

While sound has played a significant role in coral reef monitoring and restoration in recent years (to the point where sound recordings are used to entice fish back to bleached reefs), there was a poetic discovery earlier this year that the sounds emanating from coral reefs respond to the cycle of the moon. As reported in phys.org, “as the moon rose, reflecting more light onto the sea, high-frequency pulses of sound increased while low-frequency sound pulses decreased. The reverse happened after the moon set.”

In other news from the world of animal linguistics, there were breakthroughs in decoding orangutan communication and the discovery of a sperm whale “alphabet”, but it was the pathos of this headline which I enjoyed the most: “Lonely dolphin in Baltic Sea found to be talking to himself.”

“The researchers noted that the dolphin continued talking when no humans were around, showing it was not trying to talk to them,” the article continues. “They suggest it is possible some of the voicings are related to emotional outbursts, similar to a human being laughing at something despite being alone. They also suggest it is possible the creature is simply lonely and talking to itself is a means of distraction.” We’ve all been there.

See you in 2025!

Sounds

Jenny Sturgeon

paths.made.walking

(Hudson Records)

In the summer of 2023, Jenny Sturgeon walked 864km across Scotland, from Kirk Yetholm near the border with England, to Cape Wrath Lighthouse, at the far north west of the mainland. This album is a sound diary of her journey, the length of each track corresponding to the distance walked that day (6 seconds per kilometre), and named after the what3words location where it was recorded. A slow listen that brings you down to Sturgeon’s pace, paths.made.walking is an intimate portrait of a landscape at ground level, and an invitation to attend to the details of environments through which we pass. Sturgeon also includes instructions for listening (using headphones at around 1/3 of the full volume, to match the ambient sounds outside), inserting her recordings into the environments in which they’re being re-encountered. (Thanks to Tommy Perman for the tip!)

Sam Annand

Cupar Grain Silo

(Blackford Hill Audio)

Staying in Scotland for something altogether different, Cupar Grain Silo is both the name of and site where Sam Annand composed his debut release for Blackford Hill Audio. Initially part of a project on reverberant spaces, the silo’s 60-metre tower has a reverberation time (the time it takes for sound to fade) of 36.5 seconds, which is three times that of St Paul’s Cathedral. Leaning into its acoustic properties and weaving the silo’s reverb into his own electronic productions, the resulting album plays with the sonic properties of this unique piece of architecture, referring back to Scotland’s industrial heritage in the process.

various artists

harkening critters

(forms of minutiae)

The collection I did not know I needed, and maybe you didn’t either. Four hours of field recordings and soundscape compositions stitched together from the warbling, freewheeling, stridulating melange of acoustic signals and “non-human semantics” of the animal kingdom. What does that mean in pratice? Maybe just what you’d expect: “Little-known vibroscapes of insects, the hiccuping calls of hammer-headed bats, the peculiar gurgles of rock ptarmigans, the eerie signals of ribbon seals, the formic attacks of ants, a detour to the rhythm of yeast, the rustles of pink river dolphins, and the whimsical cries of tropical frogs.” For more from (forms of minutiae) you can read my interview with label foudner Pablo Diserens here.)

Rubbish Music

Fatbergs

(Persistence of Sound)

The release that proves once and for all that Kate Carr can make music out of literally anything. Carr and Iain Chambers’ Rubbish Music project has previously used sophisticated, playful foley techniques to question our relationship with waste, but none has tackled quite such a gargantuan task as the monstrous subterranean conglomeration of wet wipes, nappies, food waste and oil known as the fatberg. A deeply unsettling, fabulously strange listen, and my pick for this year’s Christmas #1.

An-Ting 安婷

Lost Communications 失絡之聲

Multi-disciplinary artist An-Ting 安婷 delves into the frenzied, confusing world of interspecies communication on a record that abstracts our relationship with both birdsong and the brooding electronics she folds them into. Featuring binaural recordings made in the UK, Mongolia, Sichuan, Hong Kong and Taiwan, each track riffs on a different bird, whose idiosyncratic chirping cues up the sonic world that is created for it to dwell in. In some ways perhaps an interesting companion piece to Kate Carr’s A Field Guide to Phantasmic Birds, which she discussed in our interview on the newsletter last year.

John Grzinich

Ice Tectonics

(Saamleng)

Sound captures change in a way that images capture instances. Having lived in Estonia for 20 years, John Grzinich has become acquainted with the mutable temperaments of ice, dynamic shifts of which occur over time and are often registered as sonic events. These recordings document ice in its transitional states, and aside from emphasising what a fluid entity ice can be, also reveal some of its more haunting qualities. Or to quote Chris Thompson, to whom I sent this a few weeks ago: “It’s no surprise people hundreds of years ago had such fantastic myths and mysteries. It’s the middle of the night and you catch those noises from the depths of the darkness. A pure feast for the imagination!”

Benjamin Tassie

A Ladder is Not the Only kind of Time

(Birmingham Contemporary)

I came across this release recently on Bandcamp’s monthly field recording rundown (which is also worth checking out), and loved both the gentle nature of the music and the simplicity of the idea - featuring three water-powered instruments that Tassie designed with Sam Underwood to be played by the water of the Rivelin Valley in Sheffield. “Playing beside the water meant becoming attuned to its sounds and pace,” Tassie explains, “to the way the river played the instruments, to how the environment dictated the tempo and feeling of a track.” An unsentimental nod to the mills and water-wheels of the region’s industrial heritage, and an original take on the compositional potential it contains.

Fohn

Seanteach

(ODDA Recordings)

Since it launched in 2023, I’ve been doing a bit of work for Thea H-D’s ODDA Recordings, whose catalogue of releases engages among other things with ideas of memory and landscape. That I didn’t work on this one gives me even more licence to include it here (after I was alerted to it again by ’s excellent Irish music newsletter Anois, Os Ard). Blending traditional Irish fiddle with field recordings from Connemara, the windswept region on the West Coast of Ireland where Fohn’s father’s family is from, Seanteach (which translates as ‘old house’) is thick with a spectral melancholy that reminded me of a provocation sound artist Cathy Lane once posited: “do past lives and past events leave sonic traces and how can we hear them in the present?”

Lamina

Sueños acuáticos

(Mappa Editions)

Lots of spine-tingling bubbles, gurgles and ripples to get stuck into here on French artist Clarice Calvo-Pinsolle’s new project as Lamina. Tactile, visceral recordings of water swill in and out of focus so effortlessly it’s sometimes hard to know where the organic ends and the synthetic begins. Theoretical frameworks come in the form of hydrofeminist and posthuman ideas, such as that of Astrida Neimanis’ Bodies of Water. I’ve had this on a few times now and each time I’ve found myself submerged in the best possible way.

Ibukun Sunday

Harmony / Balance

(Phantom Limb)

Expansive drones and detailed field recordings weave their way into the texture of Lagos-based composer Ibukun Sunday’s new record Harmony/Balance. I came across this on ’s recommendations column from his This Week in Sound newsletter (well worth checking out too) and gracefully defer to The Guardian’s astute description of Harmony/Balance as a record that “sometimes flirts with dystopian horror, but always resolves itself, throbbing and glistening with a quietly ecstatic joy.”

Félicia Atkinson

Space as an Instrument

(Shelter Press)

It’s always a joy to encounter a new Félicia Atkinson record and on Space as an Instrument she positions her inquiry at the intersection of the self and universe, the voice and the void. Interested in temporal and spatial scales, and the blurring of internal and external environments, Atkinson plays with depth and intimacy through the use both of her own spoken word and field recordings which shimmer and slip through the fabric of the work. The centrepiece for me - and perhaps of the record as a whole - is the unsettling ‘Thinking iceberg’, written in response to Olivier Remaud’s book Thinking Like An Iceberg, which explores a more-than-human perspective on the relationship between ice, time and culture. Through delicate syncopations of found sound and synth drones, it is a composition of contrasts - both stark and poetic, vast in its scope and sensitive to the smallest details.

Alice Boyd

Cloud Walking

(Self-released)

“One hears it without listening as one breathes without thinking,” Nan Shepherd wrote of a river she encountered in Scotland’s Cairngorm Mountains. “But to a listening ear the sound disintegrates into many different notes.” Listening, for Shepherd, was a conscious act and one that connected her with the natural world. This new EP by singer-songwriter and sound artist Alice Boyd was inspired by 4 days spent retracing the Shepherd’s footsteps across the Cairngorms, featuring five compositions that draw on elegiac folk and chamber pop instrumentation, while also leaning into Boyd’s work as a field recordist. I’ve only heard ‘Little River’ so far, but I love how it conveys something of the wonder and sadness of a landscape I’d previously only encountered in Shepherd’s words.

Radio & Podcasts

• I had intended to start this section flagging a recent Short Cuts episode on Sound Waves that was aired on BBC Radio 4 and which you can listen back to here. But with news that the BBC has decided to bring the series to an end, it feels even more important to point to the wonderful archive of audio documentaries and adventurous sound works that Short Cuts has broadcast over the last 12 years.

• The Radiophonic Institute (responsible for the Sound of the Year awards, Museum of Sound and Oram Awards among other things) has launched a new podcast called The Radiophonic Institute Travel Agency promising imaginative sonic journeys across time and space. The first is a piece of fictional time-travel recalling Scotland Before & After the Highland Clearances, while the latest episode takes a trip to the Maunsell Forts in the Thames estuary - abandoned WW2 platforms that have variously been squatted by pirate radio broadcasters and utopian micronation builders.

Exhibitions

• Jana Winderen’s sound piece The River is currently installed at the Natural History Museum. Recorded beneath the River Thames and presented on a large array of spacialised speakers, it is one of the few installations that you’d actually be justified to call “immersive”. There’s also something quite surreal about hearing the aquatic life and boat engines merge with the thundering footsteps of over-stimulated children, who are really only there to see the dinosaurs.

• At The Serpentine this autumn is Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst’s The Call, which makes a case for collaborative sound making in the age of AI. I love Herndon’s music and her exploration of artificial intelligence as a viable creative tool is a breath of fresh air in a debate that tends towards extremes. Here, the duo use the choral tradition of call-and-response as their medium through which to encourage collaboration between visitors and the machine learning models they’ve trained.

• Photographer Anastasia Samoylova’s Adaptation opened this month at the Saatchi Gallery. In work that engages with the often absurd post-natural landscapes we live amongst, Samoylova captures the rising tides of late capitalism in eerie and painterly tones. The work is full of puzzles and subtle juxtapositions, linking the climate crisis, inequality and advertising in ways that feel all the more pertinent following the reelection of Donald Trump.

Books

• “I am concerned with the power of sound! And what it can do to the body and the mind.” This quote from Pauline Oliveros sits at the centre of a new collection of writings called Bodies of Sound: Becoming a Feminist Ear. Edited by Irene Revell and Sarah Shin, and published by Silver Press, it “offers a resonant exploration of feminist sonic cultures and radical listening in over fifty contributions.” I’ve only managed to dip into it since picking up a copy last week but have already enjoyed pieces by Sara Ahmed, Cathy Lane, Christina Hazboun and Tomoko Hojo.

• Sonic Faction is a new collection edited by Justin Barton, Maya B. Kronic and Steve Goodman exploring the audio essay as medium and method. Here contributors include Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Angus Caryle and Kodwo Eshun, among others.

• Another edited collection on the academic side of things is The Routledge Companion to the Sound of Space, which is edited by Emma-Kate Matthews, Jane Burry and Mark Burry. Needless to say the proposition to explore the conceptual and practical relationships between sound and space lends itself to a wide variety of approaches, which open out to include “technical, creative, cultural, political, philosophical, psychological, and physiological perspectives”.

• Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha’s latest collection Forest of Noise has been published in the UK. Like his previous collection Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear (which inspired this post on the sound of war last year), there is a sonic quality to Toha’s writing which expresses in immediate clarity the resilience and struggle of living under occupation and unfolding genocide. This interactive feature by The Guardian also does a powerful job of communicating the trauma of life in Gaza “amid the incessant sounds of war.”

Talks

• The LCC / CRiSAP Autumn Sound Arts lecture series has a few more dates lined up before the end of the year, including sound artist and architect Mhamad Safa on 5th December and composer, turntablist and performer Mariam Rezaei a week later on the 12th December. Free ticket sign-up is here.

• Also on the 12th December, Safa will be in conversation with Gascia Ouzounian to discuss ‘counter-listening’ or “listening against official and hegemonic narratives of contested events, including in the contexts of war and genocide; and listening for sounds and voices that have been occluded and erased, particularly in the aftermath of mass violence.” The talk is part of the RCA School of Architecture's programme "Sonic Architectures", and you can sign up here.

Video

And finally… Werner Herzog listening to seals. When possibly he could have been listening to dolphins too.

If you’ve made it this far, well done! Hopefully with more regularity these round-ups won’t be quite so long. If there’s something you’d like to recommend for next time, stick it in the comments below.

Two-hundred and thirty years ago, biologist Lazzarro Spallanzani was in his laboratory in the city of Pavia in Northern Italy, heating up a piece of metal wire to insert it into the cornea of a live bat. Once he had done so, to the considerable discomfort of the bat, he pulled out the eyeball with a pair of pliers, cut it at the stem and pasted an opaque leather disk in its place. Satisfied that the bat could no longer see, he let it from his grasp, extinguished the candle by which he had been working and watched as it flew with ease between all he had put in its way. “During such flight,” Spallanzani wrote in a letter to fellow scientists in the autumn of 1793, “we observe furthermore that before arriving at the opposite wall, the bat turns and flies back dexterously avoiding the obstacles such as walls, a pole set across its path, the ceiling, the people in the room, and whatever other bodies may have been placed about him in an effort to embarrass him. In short,” Spallanzani concluded, “he shows himself just as clever and expert in his movements in the air as a bat possessing its eyes.”

Like many scientists of the era, Lazzaro Spallanzani’s oeuvre was wide and he is remembered now as much for his pioneering research into in vitro fertilisation as he is for determining why stones skim across the surface of the water. He was 64 years old when he turned his attention to bats, fascinated and bemused by these nocturnal primates - as taxonomist Carl Linnaeus had deemed them - and dedicated much of the rest of 1793 to pursuing that which allowed them to navigate in the dark.

In systematic and often brutal fashion, he eliminated one sense at a time, moving from sight to taste by cutting out a bat’s tongue, and then smell by plugging up its nostrils, only to see both experiments have no discernible impact on the bat in flight (other than, he concluded, possibly compromising the bat’s capacity to breathe). If there was a prevailing theory at the time however, it was that bats navigate through touch - sensing changes in air pressure as they flap past solid objects. To rule this out Spallanzani coated one of his test subjects snout to wing in varnish and flour paste. The bat would at first have difficulty flying, he observed, only to regain its vigour and pass all obstacles, including silk threads, that were asked of it. “It is to be noted,” Spallanzani wrote dryly, “that a second or even a third coat of varnish does not hinder the normal flight of the animal.”

When it came to hearing, Spallanzani was also initially sceptical. Having filled the ears of eleven bats with wax, he noted that ten flew unimpaired, convinced that the hearing sense could not be involved since he himself could hear no sound. Baffled, but not beaten, Spallanzani asserted that, having exhausted all five senses, “there is some new organ or sense which we do not have and of which, consequently, we can never have any idea.” If he, Lazzaro Spallanzani could not discover it, then it must be new to everyone.

French naturalist Georges Cuvier was not impressed. Wholeheartedly rejecting the idea of a sixth sense, he published a paper in 1795 advocating instead for the touch hypothesis - that bats navigate through a heightened sensing of the air through which they fly. Such was the strength of Cuvier’s conviction and the weight of his reputation, that the theory was accepted for much of the following century.

Cuvier’s argument may have been more rational than Spallanzani’s speculative assumption of a sixth sense, but in truth there was little about the study of bats that was not touched by the myths and cultural bias in the Western world which had long painted bats as malevolent, devilish creatures. References to bats as unclean or symbols of the dark can be found in the Old Testament. Medieval paintings of devils were given webbed, bat-like appendages, while the Satan of Milton’s Paradise Lost was invariably depicted as having pointed wings. Animals of the witching hour, inhabitants of the night, the nocturnal habits of bats aroused the suspicions of Francis Bacon in his 1625 writing Essays and Councils, while it was the hybridity of bird and beast, day and night which animated Comte de Buffon to describe bats as monstrous beings. The climate into which Spallanzani began his bat experiments was hardly one of universal acclaim.

When Dram Stoker imagined Dracula as a villain with vampiric tendencies, the bat suffered another major setback in the cultural imagination, one forever imprinted with the mark of deviance and danger. For when they weren’t preying on the blood of their victims, bats were entering their dreams, symbolic of the onset of madness or depression, harbingers of our darkest fears, as they are in Goya’s painting The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, or in the acid-soaked hallucinations of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The “sixth sense” that Spallanzani bestowed on bats would, two hundred years later, be appropriated by Bruce Willis as a sign of clairvoyance, of communing with the dead.

I remember being touched by D.H. Lawrence’s poems of Birds, Beasts and Flowers as a child, and his vivid descriptions of the bird “flying round the room in insane circles” in fact being “… A bat! / A disgusting bat”. Lawrence was leaning into an image of the bat wrapped in colonial fever dreams of tropical blood-suckers that played into the fears of otherness in the imaginations of Europeans. Accusations that bats might have been responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic have done little to assuage those fears. But as Tessa Laird writes, “it is unwholesome thoughts about bats which indicate the real human maladies: paranoia, hallucination and pathological anthropocentrism.”

One person who was not willing to accept Spallanzani’s sixth sense hypothesis, nor that of touch proposed by Cuvier, was a Swiss medic and naturalist called Louis Jurine, who had been exposed to Spallanzani’s research and undertook a series of further experiments to test whether it was in fact hearing that played a defining role. Plugging the ears of his bats with turpentine, wax, pomatum and tinder mixed with water, he began to see results that differed from Spallanzani’s own, watching as his bats clattered into one object after another. “The organ of hearing appears to supply that of sight in the discovery of bodies, and to furnish these animals with different sensations to direct their flight, and enable them to avoid those obstacles which may present themselves,” he wrote. Published in 1798, Jurine’s statement became the first clear-cut expression of a theory of bat flight that would, almost 150 years later, be called echolocation.

Sometimes, when I’m stuck for something to listen to, I’ll visit the Locustream Soundmap - an interactive, evolving collection of live broadcasts streaming continuously from various locations around the world. This morning while writing this newsletter, I’ve spent time at the Bariya Studio in New Dehli, where planes, traffic and the sounds of distant construction blend with a vibrant chorus of bird life and human voices. I’ve listened to the gentle lapping of waves at Stromness Harbour in Orkney; I can tell you that right now it is absolutely bucketing it down at the Skaftfell Art Center in Iceland; and, perhaps even more extraordinarily, what it currently sounds like under the surface of Amsterdam’s inner city waterways.

What I love about the Locustream Soundmap is both how it seems to expand and contract our experience of the world. As the artist behind the underwater Amsterdam streams above Lia Mazzari discussed in her presentation at the recent In The Field 2 conference, live audio transmissions such as these (and the wonderful SoundCamp, whose work you should also check out) explore the “perpetual oscillation between here and elsewhere” that has come to define our digital lives. I may be here, listening to the sound of the road outside my window in East London, but I am also elsewhere, under the water of a canal in Amsterdam, with boats passing overhead. Mazzari makes the argument that live audio transmissions such as these can have both an “activating and grounding” impact on the listener, creating a reflective interval, in which the distance between where we are and what we are hearing creates not dissonance but engagement.

I think Mazzari’s reflections on what it means to “listen with” - and the nature of the Locustream project itself - offer an interesting context in which to introduce that today (18th July) is World Listening Day - a “global community event” started by the World Listening Project, whose primary aim is to “celebrate the listening practices of the world and the ecology of its acoustic environments.”

World Listening Day takes place on what would have been R. Murray Schafer’s birthday (who, if you’ve not come across that name before, was one of the foremost theorists of the soundscape and acoustic ecology). While Schafer’s approaches to listening were undoubtedly influential, they have become increasingly contested as the academic field around sound and listening has developed. The nature of the debate is perhaps best left for another time, but for anyone who wants to get a sense of his work, his 1977 book The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World is the place to start.

For this year’s iteration, World Listening Day put out an open call for activations that encourage active engagement with the auditory environment, under the theme “Listening to the Weave of Time” (chosen by Chilean sound artists Valentina Villarroel Ambiado and Camila Cijka Arzola, who work as the art collective AOIR.)

There are many events to explore (online and in person / here and elsewhere), but a few that stand out include writer Ellen Wiles’ Sound Stories (a literary soundwalk of Buzzard View in Somerset, and fictional sound story Riverlandia); Diego Veliz’ Sound Desert project from the Atacama Desert; the launch of K-A-B ART + SOUND’s Listening Pod; Voix de la rivière, a live web stream from beneath Quebec’s Haute-Yamaska river; and Willydah, Winter 2024, which transports listeners to a biodiverse farm in New South Wales.

For those lucky enough to be present, there is also a river listening soundwalk in Medellín, Colombia; Leah Barclay’s K’gari field trip in Queensland, Australia; Danny Clark and Jacek Smolicki’s The Sounds We Eat at the Herter Community Garden in Boston, USA; and Listening to the Voices of the Fen, at Wicken Fen in Cambridgeshire, UK.

You can find out more about World Listening Day and the World Listening Project on their websites.

Reading about listening

• This month’s New Yorker features a profile of artist and audio investigator Lawrence Abu Hamdan, whose acoustic forensics organisation Earshot produces sonic investigations for communities affected by corporate, state, and environmental injustice. Most recently, investigations have focussed on Israeli attacks on Palestinian journalists and the killing of Layan Hamada and Hind Rajab in Gaza.

• Also in the New Yorker, Alex Ross - perhaps most famous as the author of the expansive survey of 20th century classical music The Rest of Noise - has written a piece that maybe R. Murray Schafer could have benefitted from reading called What Is Noise?

• A new book called Sonic Faction, exploring the audio essay as medium and method, will be published by Urbanomic in September. It has been edited by Justin Barton, Maya B. Kronic and Steve Goodman, and features contributions from Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Kodwo Eshun and Angus Carlyle, among others.

• Scientists are investigating whether acute noise pollution or an extreme sonic incident underwater led to the recent stranding of 77 pilot whales in Orkney.

• Ben Murphy - who I had the pleasure of commissioning when I was editor of The Vinyl Factory - has written a new book called Ears to the Ground: Adventures in Field recording and Electronic Music, which was published by Velocity Press in May.

Residencies, conferences and open calls

• Seismograph Peer are inviting proposals for audio papers engaging with sound and more-than-human worlds.

• Applications and registration for the ENES Bioacoustics Winter School are still open. The two-week course in January 2025 offers training in bioacoustic scientific investigations and tools.

• For followers of crows, ravens and rooks, a Corvid Vocal Communication conference is taking place online in September.

• Applications are open until the end of July for the 4th African Bioacoustics Community conference which will take place in Cape Town in early September.

• And finally, the 11th European bat detector workshop is set to take place in Catalonia in September too. I just received my bat detector in the post and have, somewhat improbably, signed up to go. I hope to see you there…

Coral Morphologic & Nick Léon

Projections of a Coral City

(Balmat)

If you’ve not come across them before, Coral Morphologic are marine biologist Colin Foord and musician J.D. McKay, whose work is often geared towards raising awareness around marine biodiversity. Working with fellow Miami-based musician Nick Léon, Coral Morphologic’s latest release features music produced to accompany a series of macroscopic projections of coral reefs splayed onto the walls of Miami’s Biscayne Boulevard over five nights in 2022. On its own, these aquatic, ambient movements have a beguiling fluidity, freighted with a sense of loss that is hard to ignore.

Rae-Yen Song and Tommy Perman

○ squigoda song cycle ● water~land~air ○

(CCA Glasgow)

Billed as a sonic collaboration between Rae-Yen Song, Tommy Perman, a tea fungus and its environment, these three evolving soundscapes were made using audio recordings of the feeding and fermentation processes of what is commonly known as kombucha, paired with improvised instrumentation featuring, among other things, a drum of dried and stretched bacterial cellulose. Produced as part of a research exhibition and live programme 'life-bestowing cadaverous soooooooooooooooooooot' collated by Rae-Yen Song at Centre for Contemporary Arts, in Glasgow, Scotland, the music itself has a wonderfully tactile quality, bubbling and squirming and breathing and evolving in step with the fungus it is drawn from.

Brian D’Souza

Mycorrhizal Fungi

(A State of Flo)

We’re going full fungal this month. A celebration of the internal rhtyhms of the mushroom, sound artist, producer and DJ Brian D’Souza (also known as Auntie Flo) kicks off his new label A State of Flo with a series of compositions made using biosonification of the electrical impulses of four types of mushroom - Oyster, Reishi, Lion’s Mane and Shiitake. Described as “a literal ecological sound walk into the mind of the mushroom”, you can read more about biosonification and the making of the record on Brian’s newsletter.

Sonido Postal

Gotas de Cueva

A recommendation from Through Sounds reader , ‘Gotas de Cueva’ captures the soundscape of a cave and its water droplets in Playa Serena, as made by sound artist Sonido Postal aka Damián Alférez. The second recommendation also comes in the form of this collection of field recordings by Argentine project Bio Portraits.

Brian Eno, Bomba Estéreo, Cosmo Sheldrake & more

feat. NATURE

(Sounds Right)

Launched on Earth Day in April, UN initiative Sounds Right will for the first recognise ‘Nature’ as an artist on streaming platforms in a drive to raise money through royalties payments that will then be distributed by environmental charity Earth/Percent to various global conservation initiatives. Contributions so far include new music from Colombian artists Bomba Estéreo and Arteciopelados, sonic naturalist Cosmo Sheldrake and ambient pioneer Brian Eno, who is also a co-founder of Earth/Percent. For more about their work, it’s worth checking out their website.

Additional Listening:

• Presented by Luca Nasciuti and Kate Carr (who I interviewed for Through Sounds a few months ago) The Field Recording Show returned for the first time in three years last month. The first episode features an extended interview with musician and academic Mark Peter Wright, whose 2022 book Listening After Nature: Field Recording, Ecology, Critical Practice offers one of the most compelling and persuasive analyses of the currents and contradictions of contemporary field recording.

• Also on Resonance FM, Benjamin Tassie’s Future Classical show this month featured a charming interview with composer and sound artist Annea Lockwood, whose work spans almost six decades, from pioneering electronic music to ecological sound maps, and a life-long fascination with rivers.

• This recent Green Dreamer episode featured a discussion with sonic geographer AM Kanngieser who here “invites us to reconsider the diverse ways in which we register both sound and silence — pushing back against the idea that listening itself is a virtuous act with universality in experience.”

• A collaboration between scientists and AI specialists in Colombia, the latest interactive website by Microsoft Uncovered is called The Rhythms of the Rainforest, and explores the way in which bioacoustics is aiding conservation efforts in the Amazon.

• In response to last week’s post about whale song, Through Sounds reader and musician Ross shared this wonderful album inspired by the humpback whale, featuring three compositions “that propose sound as a possibility to heal our interspecies relationship; as an ode to their magic.”

• And finally… Never mind the Grammys, The Sound of the Year Awards have announced their winners for 2023. Take a listen here.

For almost 20 years, marine biologist Dr. Shane Gero and his team tracked 400 sperm whales around the Caribbean, recording their vocalisations with hydrophones (underwater microphones). Unlike humpback whales, whose melodious calls had a vast cultural and scientific impact when they were first discovered in the 1960s, sperm whales make a series of clicking sounds and pulses described as “a cross between Morse code and a creaking door.” Not quite as evocative perhaps, but still full of mystery.

Since 2020, scientists have been engaged in interpreting the groups of clicks, known as codas, produced by Dr. Gero’s herd. Having sifted through thousands of hours of recordings, they began to discern patterns among the codas, grouping them into distinctive types. The word the scientists used to describe the properties of these patterns was “rubato” - a term musical in origin referring to the speeding up and slowing down of tempo. In total 156 distinct codas were identified, each with their own rhythms and rubatos. The elements which make up these codas have thus been described as the phonetic building blocks of sperm whale speech, such as the syllables of a word are for our own. Published in the Nature Communications journal in May 2024, the subsequent paper, Contextual and combinatorial structure in sperm whale vocalisations, makes the strongest case yet for a coherent cetacean linguistics.

The implications for scientific research and inter-species communication are fascinating in themselves (many of the machinations and developments are covered in this New York Times article about the research), but beyond the specifics of this discovery, I began to think more about what this desire to decode says about us. That experts still disagree about the nature of these patterns - either as forms of direct communication, or closer to the emotive qualities of music - is interesting in itself, in part because it opens a more philosophical question about our relationship to the natural world. For the scientists, artists or musicians who have worked closely with underwater acoustics - and to an extent I think for the wider public alike - the sonic life of whales still has the capacity to create a sense of awe reserved for few other creatures.

What follows is a short extract from an essay I have been writing about the history of recorded whale song, how it has impacted popular culture and why we continue to be obsessed with the language of the deep.

“It is all very well skimming across the surface and saying you know all about the sea. There still remain the terrifying under-deeps, of which we have utterly no experience.” - D.H. Lawrence, 1928

I am not a particularly strong swimmer, and I don’t like being on boats. The under-deeps that D.H. Lawrence feared are not ones to which I naturally relate. They seem like zones of sensory exclusion. No light, no sound, no way of orienting that which makes us human. When I mention the topic of underwater sound to friends, most say it’s not something they’ve ever considered. They’re not the first. The assumption often follows that where no sound can be heard, no sound exists. Even Jacques Cousteau, the great ambassador of marine life could not see (or hear) beyond his own experience. In 1956, Cousteau made a documentary (based on a book of the same name) with French director Louis Malle about aquatic environments that would be one of his most important contributions to popular science. It was called The Silent World.

And yet, ascertaining meaning from the deep is embedded in the language we use to describe it. To ‘fathom’ has come to mean grasp or understand, as to ‘sound out’ is to test the edges of things. Our relationship to the unknown is cultivated underwater, and it is here that scientists are still finding frontiers of wonder that seem almost anachronistic in an age of information overload. Enter the whale.

If there is a story that people have heard about ocean acoustics, it’s that of the humpback whale. In 1958, US navy engineer Frank Watlington was working at a top-secret hydrophone station off the coast of Bermuda, listening for Soviet submarines. Watlington was more an engineer than a biologist and had successfully developed the microphone technology that was enabling a new form of deep sea espionage. In a fluid as dense as water, sound waves travel over four times faster and carry further than they do in air. These early hydrophones were equipped with a piezoelectric transducer that was able to convert pressure change, such as that caused by a sound wave, into an electrical signal.

On that rig in the Atlantic Ocean, Frank Watlington heard a sound he had never heard before. An eerie, yawning, gaping sound, horrific in its immanence, religious in its heft. The story goes that Watlington played the recordings to local fishermen who immediately identified the sound to be that of a humpback whale. It is a recurring theme in Western science. Watlington was not the first to hear it, but he was the first to hit record.

Eight years later, these recordings came into the possession of scientist Roger Payne, who with the help of his then wife Katy and associate Scott McVay set about identifying patterns and repetitions in the whale vocalisations and transcribing them into a graphic score of which John Cage would have been proud.

Published on the cover of Science magazine in 1971, the notations bear a curious similarity with the Rosetta Stone - tentative white markings that seem to move and drift on the page, a reasonable stab at representing a sound beyond language, finding expression for something ancient and other. They were letters of sorts - codas perhaps in sperm whale terms - but letters whose meaning remained vacant, open to interpretation. “The function of the songs is unknown,” read the final line of Payne and McVay’s abstract.

The accompanying LP, Songs of The Humpback Whale, became the most popular nature recording of all time. The tracks - presented in musical terms as ‘songs’ - represented a tabula rasa to be imbued with the emotional, spiritual or scientific desires of its listeners. Judy Collins and Pete Seeger wrote their own songs about it. Bob Dylan is said to have interrupted gigs to play back snippets of it. A selection was included on NASA’s Voyager Golden Record alongside the music of J.S. Bach and Chuck Berry, launched from the depths to the skies in a speculative gesture towards interspecies collaboration. By the end of the 1970s, the album had also become the largest single pressing in recorded history when a sampler was given away to National Geographic magazine’s 10.5 million subscribers. It was even credited with playing a role in bringing about the end of commercial whaling.

What was it that resonated so widely? “The whales are pure movement and pure sound, calling for something, so lonely and sad,” Kate Bush told Sounds magazine in 1980, after she chose to open ‘Moving’ - the first track of her first album - with twenty seconds of humpback song.

Some biologists talk of a constructive anthropomorphism that takes place when projections of human emotion contribute to more empathetic non-human relationships. Where language between animals has remained beyond human comprehension, the very possibility that this language exists at all may be enough to foster a connection with the creatures of the “terrifying under-deeps”. Perhaps the loneliness or the sadness that Kate Bush hears in the sound of the whale is in fact simply an antidote to our own. To continue to seek meaning in the humpback’s melodies or the sperm whale’s codas says more about us than it does about the animal doing the talking.

Unsurprisingly, a huge amount has been written about this subject, but here are a few recommendations for further reading:

Tom Mustill - How To Speak Whale: A Voyage into the Future of Animal Communication

David Rothenberg - Thousand Mile Song: Whale Music in a Sea of Sound

Philip Hoare - Leviathan, or The Whale

Ed Yong - An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal The Hidden Realms Around Us

Alaina Claire Feldman - Minor Listening, Major Influence: Revisiting Songs of the Humpback Whale (e-flux)

I’ve been thinking about how to write about sound, music and environments in the same breath. Or maybe more specifically how to bring one’s own personal experience of a place and its sounds into a dialogue with the music that place has inspired in others. What interests me most about this is to put the political undercurrents, ecological tensions and layered histories of a landscape into a cultural context. The Suffolk coastline in the south east of England is in many ways a perfect place to explore this further, charmed as it is with deep history (both religious and military-industrial), ambiguous landscapes and a significant musical and literary tradition, that includes W.G. Sebald, Mark Fisher and Brian Eno among many others. After a brief visit last weekend, here are a few initial thoughts.

The road down to Sizewell is lined with signs. Red with yellow text, they protest the expansion of a nuclear power plant which is already underway. Sizewell A (now decommissioned) and Sizewell B (very much operational) are to be joined by Sizewell C just a stone’s throw from the shingle beach that stretches along the Suffolk coastline, overlooking what W.G. Sebald called the German Ocean.

This thin strip of beach is a frontier between forces bigger than the human. From the shore, the deep and insidious hum of the power station sets the air on edge, trembles the atoms of the wind, gets beneath your skin, between your bones, enters your soft tissue. It flat-lines, unwavering, unnatural. From the sea, the waves respond on another drone frequency, one that is circular not static, a cumulative ebb and flow that seems to build and build and never break. Between them seagulls skirt the surf. Sea kale grows silently from the stony ground. The sounds blur into one another, a negotiation or a confrontation, played out at the edge of the land.

The Suffolk coastline is one of the most rapidly eroding coastlines in Europe. Here at Sizewell, large dunes used to flank the beach until even two centuries ago. The Sizewell Gap which ran between them was a bountiful route for smugglers who would regularly lead a hundred horses laden with tea and brandy through the passageway under cover of darkness. When a coastal blockade brought the smuggling under control in the early 19^th century, tunnels were built from the beach to the cellars of the Vulcan Arms pub a few yards down the road. The existence of an alehouse was first documented in Sizewell as far back as 1540. Closed by Oliver Cromwell in the wake of the Civil War, the pub reopened in the early 1700s, named in honour of the blacksmith that had occupied the building in the intervening years. The ghost of a young lady dressed in black is said to occasionally be seen drifting through the walls of the building.

Today, the beach at Sizewell is said to be among the more stable areas on this stretch of coast. A page on the Sizewell C power station website is dedicated, somewhat poetically, to “Sizewell and the sea”. To build nuclear power stations by the sea feels reckless at best, but there is already an exchange taking place whereby sea water is used – or put to use - in the power station’s cooling system. “Sizewell A has stood on the same part of coastline since 1966 and Sizewell B has operated since 1995,” the website states. “In more than half a century, neither of those power stations has seen any flooding or significant coastal erosion.” While projections suggest that the sea level will not rise significantly if at all, the timescales against which predictions are made feel decidedly human - that is, decidedly limited. In the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, writer Haruki Murakami called it “a defeat for our imagination.”

There are no fault lines here, but walking towards the spectral dome of Sizewell B, I was reminded of Peter Cusack’s work Sounds From Dangerous Places, the first volume of which features recordings made in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. There is a danger that radiates from nuclear facilities that is hard to really quantify – a sense of all or nothing that lacks gradient or nuance. Radiation that is baked into that insidious hum, because if sound can escape, might that not be all? Cusack’s recordings captured the aftermath of an event which had already taken place, rather than one which could still come.

Eight hundred years ago, the town of Dunwich up the coast from Sizewell was the second largest and most significant port in England, with a population of around 4,000 and a footprint the size of the City of London. Here, Franciscan monks built the Greyfriars Monastery in the 1250s but, with all the will in the world and even a little help from up above, they can’t have imagined it would only last thirty years. In 1286 a ferocious storm swept half of Dunwich into the sea, taking with it the Greyfriars Monastery and much of the population, filling the port with so much silt and rubble that it never recovered. Spires from lost churches and the foundations of flooded houses have since been located under the surf at Dunwich, a good way out to sea from where the village now stands.

On a sunny day, Dunwich beach seems to take in the full sweep of the horizon. To the north the town of Southwold pokes up into the sky. You can’t see it from here, but on the promenade is a Sailors’ Reading Room, built in 1864 to keep the mariners and fishermen out of trouble. To the south, it is the dome of Sizewell B that shimmers in the haze. There is a strangeness, a sense of the uncanny that has drawn many to this place. It is a feeling articulated by the final track of Brian Eno’s 1982 album On Land, ‘Dunwich Beach, Autumn, 1960’.

It is a feeling that emerges throughout W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn and his walks along the flat Suffolk coastline, which in many ways makes this stretch of land the spiritual home of pyschogeography and hauntology - ideas concerned with excavating the ineffable layers of memory and history from the surroundings. It is also that which inspired theorist Mark Fisher and musician Justin Barton to collaborate on an album suitably called On Vanishing Land, which traces a walk from the Felixstowe container port near Ipswich to the Anglo-Saxon burial ground of Sutton Hoo. Yet more sonic reflections of a land that is slippery with stories and meanings.

In 1992, musician Julian Cope released a song called ‘Sizewell B’ that featured on his album Jehovahkill. Cope was no stranger to unplanned tragedy. On his 9^th birthday, he was having tea with his grandmother near Aberfan in Wales when an accumulation of heavy rainfall caused the colliery spoil tip above the village to collapse, sending 140,000 cubic yards of slurry sliding down the hillside, killing 116 children and 28 adults. As the residents of Sizewell might suggest - and as those as Dunwich might have done too - things look like they won’t go wrong until they do.

Is it possible to hear in the hum of the power station and the rumble of the sea a foreboding? A sense of intentions not quite aligned, of layers of history accumulated in the silt and shingle of the beach between them. A sense of brinksmanship between mankind and nature, of two forces facing one another down? Standing between them on the beach at Sizewell it would be wise to listen to both.

pablo diserens & the ocean comm/uni/ty

upstream ensemble

(forms of minutiae / TBA21–Academy)

Field recording and listening are often posited as individual acts, and recorded works the product of a single perspective on an environment. When you listen to a field recording, so the idea goes, you are listening to someone else’s listening. What happens then when a composition of found sounds is built from a multitude of perspectives? Based on an open call for water-born recordings, sound artist and forms of minutiae co-founder Pablo Diserens makes the case for a kind of dispersed, communal recording, drawing a sonic thread betweens the oceans, rivers, pipe networks, ponds, and glaciers of 35 contributors. With nods to Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening and Rachel Carson’s The Edge of The Sea, what I love most about this work is how clearly it makes the case for the interconnectedness of aquatic environments and water systems.

Ludwig Berger

Species Loneliness

(-OUS)

“I wanted to revisit the sound worlds of 1970s eco-horror films, a time of growing fears about environmental consequences,” writes landscape sound artist Ludwig Berger of his new work Species Loneliness. “Today, we no longer fear the revenge of frogs or insects; we are mourning their vanishing.” The sense of a haunting runs through the 6-track EP, and not just in the samples and field recordings that Berger draws on as his source material. Instead a feeling of alienation and nostalgia is shot through tracks like ‘Sea Of Decay’, ‘Apparent Heart’ and ‘Cocoon Death’, which seem to evoke both the toxicity of polluted landscapes and a kind of apathetic indifference which has defined the world’s inability to take any meaningful action. A dark and unsettling vision of a feeling approximated as “homesickness at home”.

Midori Takada / SHHE

MSCTY x V&A Dundee: Midori Takada / SHHE

(MSCTY_EDN)

This one has been out for 6 months, but following my recent post about Japanese environmental sounds, I couldn’t not include it. Just as many works of kankyō ongaku did in the 1980s, this album features compositions inspired by a piece of architecture, in this case the new V&A Museum in Dundee. If you’ve not come across her work before, Midori Takada is one of Japanese foremost ambient and experimental musicians (her 1983 album Through The Looking Glass was rediscovered via a quirk of the YouTube algorithm a few years ago), and here she takes the natural materials of Kengo Kuma’s design and construction as her inspiration, using her favoured wooden marimbas on three tracks that evoke the fluidity and tranquility of water. Takada’s work is backed by a 45-minute composition from Scottish-Portuguese artist Su Shaw, who also lets the rhythms of the waves, tides and the nearby River Tay run through the work.

Maria W. Horn

Panoptikon

(XKatedral)

Vita Duvan was a panopticon prison located in the town of Luleå in northern Sweden. Translated as The White Dove, Vita Duvan operated for more than 120 years, from 1856 to 1979, and it is within its decommissioned walls that Maria W. Horn first presented the sound works collected here. Taking compositional cues from the sense of isolation, surveillance and confinement the central panopticon structure was designed to impress on its prisoners, Horn positioned individual voices on speakers in different cells. On record, these compositions have an uncanny, Baroque quality that speak of the use of space to control and subjugate individuals. Four years before Vita Duvan was shut down, Michel Foucault invoked the panopticon as a metaphorical device in the disciplining and ordering of contemporary society - a silent mechanism of power that preys on the fear of surveillance and is more prescient now than ever.

Angus Carlyle, Chrystal Cherniwchan & Craig Tattersall

Non Mountain

(Umbrella Publishing)

Recordings made in the Picentini national park south of Naples in Italy form the basis of Non Mountain, which returns to two films Angus Carlyle made with Chiara Caterina, ‘Il Vertice’ (2013) and ‘Into The Outside’ (2015), and the field recordist’s previous work In The Shadow of the Silent Mountain. A collaborative and recursive project between Carlyle, artist Crystal Cherniwchan and Umbrella Publishing’s Craig Tattersall, Non Mountain reworks and responds to the original source material across mediums, accompanying the 10” record with an 84-page book. Taking its cue from René Daumal’s allegorical novel Mount Analogue, the sonics of Non Mountain fade in and out of focus as moments of densely textured, physical sound give way to an ethereal, shimmering haze where the air is thin and nothing is quite as it seems.

Additional Listening:

• Artist Gillies Adamson Semple is releasing a new album of compositions recorded in situ on the world’s oldest functioning pipe organ, housed in the Valere Basilica in Switzerland. The recordings on Volumes play with the materiality of the space - you can hear the stops and echoes throughout - and connect the broader ecological themes of Semple’s work. I spoke to Gillies for the liner notes that accompany the release, and you can find out more about it here.

• Leo Heiblum’s Encyclopedia Sónica Vol. 1 is the latest release on Language of Sound. An intricate and sensitive engagement with the sounds of earth, Heiblum uses the rhythms and melodies of the natural world as both his vocabulary and source material, seemingly erasing his own agency as a composer in the process.

• MINING’s new album Chimet is made from the data sonification of a storm sequence which passed across the north east of England over the course of a week in 2017. Structured by the weather front, the 74-minute piece is accompanied by Matthew Bourne’s piano, cello and synth improvisations, to provide an extra layer of drama to the score.

• Scientists are experimenting with playing the sounds of healthy coral reefs from underwater speakers to lure fish back to degraded ones. There’s a short segment on the research via NPR which you can listen to here. Thank you for the tip.

• And finally… You know you’re onto something when David Attenborough gets on board. The latest series by the grandfather of ecological hyperbole is called The Secret World Of Sound and is currently airing on Sky. (You can watch the trailer here, which sounds more like it’s been scored by Hans Zimmer). Not to be outdone, Apple TV also has a sonic series on the go, this time narrated by Tom Hiddleston, called EarthSounds. Must be having a moment.

A naked man is swinging from a rope ladder made of bones. Tears weep from the eye of a giant t-shirt. The smell of fresh turf rises from the floor. Reverb and distortion echo from wall to wall. Food is served. Under the auspices of a twenty-foot inflatable tardigrade, Tianzhuo Chen’s marathon happening, TRANCE, is entering its witching hour and things have begun to feel a little strange.

It was only Friday night, but TRANCE already felt like the centrepiece of the festival weekend at the heart of the Sonic Acts Biennial, which celebrated its 30^th anniversary across two months of programming in February and March 2024. The overarching theme for this year’s Biennial was drawn from David Abram’s 1996 book The Spell of the Sensuous, embracing “a multiplicity of ways of sensing and intuiting, engaging with the thresholds of the body”. At Paradiso in central Amsterdam where TRANCE unfolded, those thresholds were thoroughly transgressed. For weeks now, I have tried to explain what went on that night to anyone who will listen, and for weeks now I have failed to do so. But perhaps that’s the point. You can explain the body in terms of atoms and cells, but sensory experience is often very difficult to rationalise.

What makes Sonic Acts unique as a festival is its engagement in both the intellectual and the visceral expressions of sound and experimental music. Alongside two exhibitions in the city, the festival weekend in late February features club nights and listening spaces, an audio-visual concert series and a two-day symposium. Conceptual engagement with ideas sits alongside live programming, even if transitioning from a 12-hour rave into an 8-hour lecture series means you might need to sneak out for a nap every now and then.

When I last visited Sonic Acts in October 2022, the bulk of the festival weekend took place in Het HEM, a munitions factory-turned-art space on the edges of the city. I wrote about it here, and while the work was fascinating and the performances truly memorable, presenting the whole programme within the same post-industrial context gave it a sense of familiarity. We know what experimental sound feels like in vast concrete rooms. This time round, splitting the programme across different venues allowed the spaces themselves to play a role in how the work was received.

My introduction to this year’s Biennial is with the two exhibitions – at W139 gallery and Looiersgracht 60. I arrive at W139 in the rain on a dark and relentlessly damp evening. The kind of wet that creeps down your back and into your bones. I seek refuge at the far end of the main room and sink into a water bed adorned with day-glo foam and fluoro tassels to watch the 3D models of Pedro Matias’ two-channel video ‘Dépaysement’ twist and writhe. “Our bodies and its territories are as much a mystery as the bottom of the ocean,” the narrator muses.  

I move over to the bean bags to watch Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner’s film ‘My Want of You Partakes of Me’ (sound design by Action Pyramid), which examines the “physiological, psychological, spiritual, literary and scientific dimensions of being consumed.” Concerned with the material and in part the metaphysical, I join the film as a body is passing through an MRI scanner, and learn that it is medically unethical to scan someone without just cause, should it reveal something negative that might otherwise not have been discovered. How little we want to know about our bodies, how scared we are of what we might find. If part of everything we eat stays within us, the film asks, what does that mean for the words and images we consume? Or the people whose love we devour? Surely some of them will remain within us too. “We exist to desire and be desired.”

If the work at W139 is concerned directly with knowing the body, then that at Looiersgracht 60 feels more concerned with the body as it exists within systems. The space is dominated by the work of Lukas Marxt, whose 11 pieces form the bulk of the show, and pull the themes towards the intersection of ecology and the military-industrial. Situated at the Salton Sea in southern California, his work explores legacies of nuclear testing and soil contamination and the mechanisation of agriculture. Watching labourers picking and packing iceberg lettuce never seemed more dystopian.

The echoes of imperial militarism are further explored in the ‘soil chromatography’ – the use of soils to chemically expose images – of Elena Khurtova and Anika Schwarzlose’s ‘Residue, colliding archives: Chapter 3’. Here, the artists interrogate the legacy of the Hembrug weapons facility on the outskirts of Amsterdam where Het HEM is located. How these spaces are understood formed a chunk of my review of Sonic Acts 2022, and it was interesting to see the site addressed 18 months later, particularly given that Schwarzlose performed there in 2022.

The following morning I make my way to Zone2Source, a glass box on the edges of Amstelpark for the opening of the weekend’s “Listening Room” programme, which presents a wide range of newly commissioned and classic sound works on an 8.2 channel sound system. I lie back and listen to Felicity Mangan’s ‘Pedospheric Vibes’, watching the wind rush silently through the leafless trees outside. Here again, it is the nature of the architecture which sets the tone of the experience. Listening spaces are often enclosed, self-consciously sealed from the bleed of the outside world, but at Zone2Source, you are reminded more of just how porous these boundaries are. What makes listening a fluid way of apprehending the world is not pure and focussed attention to one discrete thing, but the possibility for overlap, for relations emerging between objects and processes.

In the 20 minutes of Jonáš Gruska’s ‘Zaburina’, I hear a dozen planes departing and arriving from Schiphol Airport overhead, their jets cutting sonic trails across the work. During Slikback’s ‘Collision’, it sounds like we’re inside the engine itself. The airport is such a definitive aspect of contemporary urban life that nothing which exists on the ground can be apprehended without it. If I had had more time, I would have stayed longer at Zone2Source, or returned again to hear the wide range of works selected. It was a rare moment where I felt like I could put both my body and my mind to rest and just let the listening take over.

Regardless of the nature of the work, festival weekends create a sense of urgency that is hard to resist, and the slow unfolding of the Listening Room felt like it existed on a slightly different bandwidth. In the 36 hours that follow, I hear lectures by Imani Jacqueline Brown on ecological diasporas, Margarida Mendes on sensing underwater, and belit sağ on the instability of archives. I spend an unknowable amount of time watching Dis Fig, Felix-Florian Tödtloff and ¥ØU$UK€ ¥UK1MAT$U at TRANCE , and find a few hours in between to call in on Meredith Monk at Oude Kerk. Although not part of the festival itself, the retrospective of Monk’s extraordinary voice works feels like a fitting accompaniment, and the draughty hallows of the 13^th century chapel offers a much needed pause amid the heightened senses of the weekend.

On Saturday evening, the main programming takes place at Muziekgebouw – a grand concert hall overlooking the river - where the line-up includes a new commission by Sarah Davachi, an a/v realisation of Kassel Jaeger’s Shifted In Dreams (who I interviewed for Sonic Acts’ Ecoes magazine) with Eléonore Huisse, and Aho Ssan re-engineering his 2023 album Rhizomes with Sevi Iko Dømochevsky. The sheer scale of the audio-visual array lives up to the title Expanded Experience. At this size, Tina Frank ∞ General Magic’s ‘Super Key’ is punishingly psychedelic. Sound as visceral, physical, for the body more than the mind. Maybe the lack of sleep was catching up with me but I felt somehow more capable of assimilating the gentler moments than those which pushed beyond.

The final act of the evening once again made use of a different environment to put the bodies of the audience in a new configuration. Downstairs in the loading dock of the Muziekgebouw, Russell Haswell & Hugo Esquinca are exhuming great chunks of sound from ‘CADÁVER EXQUISITO #4’ – close to an hour of crunching noise and punctuating rhythm emanating from the toxic green haze. People drift in and out of focus, some lost in the onslaught, others more concerned with the inflatable black balloons which float and bounce between the lasers, uncannily in tune with the sound. As the show draws to a close, the loading gate opens in a cloud of smoke, tipping the audience out into the cold, wet night.

“As we reacquaint ourselves with our breathing bodies, then the perceived world itself begins to shift and transform. When we begin to consciously frequent the wordless dimension of our sensory participations … hitherto unnoticed or overlooked presences begin to stand forth from the periphery and to engage our awareness.” Seen, or heard, or felt (or smelled and tasted??) through the lens of these words from David Abrams’ The Spell of the Sensuous, the intentions of Sonic Acts’ 2024 Biennial come into focus. How does the human experience take its place in wider sensorial ecologies, where sight – the sense we have always held dearest - plays just one part? The question it seems to ask mirrors that posed by Donna Haraway in 1988 essay ‘Situated Knowledges’: "What other sensory powers do we wish to cultivate besides vision?"

The problem - and the beauty - of the sensorial, I suppose, is that it is harder to summon than the rational. This is not to make an opposition of the two, but when it comes to art and music, it is often safer, stabler, and less elusive to communicate meaning over feeling. I am reminded of something François J. Bonnet said in our interview for Ecoes. True feeling - that ineffable, sensuous moment - is mysterious, almost magical. It can be encouraged but it can’t be engineered. “It emerges in relation,” Bonnet continued.  “My job as a composer is to maximise the possibility of making this happen. It’s like finding the right sky and the right time of year to see shooting stars. To me, when a composer or musician tries too hard to achieve that, then it’s not music, it’s rhetoric. And to me rhetoric is language … As soon as it has re-encapsulated itself into a discursive, dialectic approach, it becomes something else.”

This was the challenge faced by many of the works at Sonic Acts, and I think ultimately this is what made TRANCE feel so special. You can talk about the sensuous all you want, evoke it in videos or build it into the architecture of your installations. You can create environments that are immersive, place the body in an unusual context or play with the extremes of light and sound. But to succeed in softening those edges between the audience and the idea requires a different sort of alchemy. TRANCE did not just evoke catharsis, it manifested it. Experiences such as these evade description. Atoms blurred, bodies dissolved.

It sounds contradictory to say, but after seven years as the editor of a music magazine, I think I’d forgotten how to listen. As much as I tried to emphasise the value of in-depth engagement in the work I commissioned, navigating an online publishing industry preoccupied with making noise rather than fostering attention had taken its toll on my capacity to build my own relationships with sound and music. When I left the magazine in February 2020, I was looking for a reset, but had no real idea what form that would take.

The passage below recounts my first steps towards a different kind of listening, and which I’ve continued to follow in the four years since.

I came to the Isle of Muck in the Inner Hebrides for the first time in 2019. An emergency holiday of sorts, planned a few days in advance with the intention of getting as far away from London as possible. I camped for three nights down by a small beach half way along the island’s only road, each day swearing it would be the last. It was mid-August and the wind drove across the flat landscape like an express train, pulling sheets of rain in its wake. I boiled water under an umbrella with a box of borrowed matches and walked forty minutes in each direction to use the bathroom. On the final day, as I was packing up the tent, an eagle passed overhead, hovered for a moment to look me in the eye and continued on its way.

Six months later I was back again, hurrying a wheelbarrow of supplies up a steep, muddy path to the cottage at the far end of the island. This time was no accident. I had handed in my notice as editor of an online music magazine and had come to Muck to leave the internet behind. The plan had been to spend eight weeks. When the pandemic was declared three weeks later, this quickly changed. There was no end date, just a small amount of space and an awful lot of time on an island with no postbox.

As a way to structure the day, I dreamed up small projects using the hand-held sound recorder I had been given as promo by an audio company but never previously used. Record in the same place, at roughly the same time every day, for five minutes. Sometimes I got soaked and could hear nothing but the hammering of raindrops on my yellow mackintosh. At others, the wind all but obliterated any signal, like ink spilled across a picture. When it was still however, parts of the island’s geography came into focus - birds from the garden, waves from the bay beneath, the distant hums and whirrs of the farm at work. The sound of sparrows’ wings as they fluttered beneath the eaves of the cottage.

Through the methodical process of daily recording, a slow transformation of the environment emerged - or perhaps more accurately - a slow transformation in my ability to perceive it. Very few musicians have been able to rearrange my experience of the world. One was Arthur Russell, who played the cello unlike anyone I’d heard before. It had been at least ten years since then, but I felt like it was happening again.

Over the course of the following months, I began to discern timbres and textures I’d not previously been aware of. The way birdsong responded to the weather, how the wind in the grass evoked a sense of distance, how formations of rock and sand changed the break of a wave. With the help of an app called BirdNET, I learned to recognise sandpipers and eider ducks, skylarks and snipe, and noticed how the acts of hearing and naming were intimately connected. I also imagined in my soundscape a subtle change in the emphasis of the seasons, that the proportions of rain, wind and sun were shifting as spring progressed. It may have been a fantasy. As I would later be told by a leading bioacoustician, humans are not particularly adept at perceiving patterns in sound.

If somewhat indistinct, I did though sense that life was becoming cyclical again, no longer tethered to that linear surge of online junk time. I heard the dawn chorus not as a single moment but as a repeating ritual, drawing a small circle inside the bigger circles of spring tides and seasonal migrations. I don’t think I would have noticed the arrival of the arctic terns had I not been surprised one day when their unfamiliar, shard-like squawking interrupted a recording I was making of a lapwing in the long grass. I learned that an owl, hunting in the mid-summer dusk, sounds nothing like I had been led to believe.

Pointing my recorder towards a small stream, I heard it refract into a thousand entwined polyrhythms, all of which were coalescing to form the sound I’d previously understood to be that of rushing water. Although I did not read it until the following year, Nan Shepherd describes something similar in The Living Mountain. “One hears it without listening as one breathes without thinking,” she writes. “But to a listening ear the sound disintegrates into many different notes.” It occurred to me that sound, in one sense so intangible, was in fact deeply concerned with the materiality of things. That it was through sound alone that we understood the world to be a solid place, of surfaces, textures and grains. How frictionless a world without sound would be. How light and how plastic. 

That which I would have previously registered as single, discrete entities such as “bird”, “wave”, “rain” became implicated in a choreography of matter and vibration. There were no outcomes, no finished forms, just physical processes, constantly repeating, never the same. This attentive, augmented listening - because in a sense a recorder is like a magnifying glass - was peeling away the static surface of the world as I had previously known it, to reveal the movement beneath.

Hello everyone and welcome back to Through Sounds. It’s been a slower start to the year on the newsletter front as I’ve just returned from a two-week research trip to Colombia, interviewing scientists, sound artists, and bird-watchers about their relationships to listening. Much of this will find its way into the newsletter over the coming weeks and months, but now here’s a quick round-up of listening recommendations connected to some of the people I met while I was travelling.

VozTerra

San José de Fragua

(VozTerra)

The first person I met in Bogotá was musician and activist Héctor Buitrago. One half of hugely successful Colombian rock band Aterciopelados, Héctor also dedicates his time to developing programmes and initiatives around environmental sound. One of them is VozTerra, a collective of five sonic practitioners from different disciplines who create projects in different parts of Colombia to foster environmental engagement through field recordings, tapping into local and community-based knowledge of these rich sonic landscapes. VozTerra has an extensive multi-media website to explore, a back-catalogue of albums, and has also recently begun uploading raw field recordings, such as the ones above from the region around San José del Fragua in western Colombia. Like VozTerra’s work as a whole, these are not interested in pristine representations of nature but include the sounds of human life which live amongst it too. A full interview with Héctor will be published in the coming weeks.

Atractor Estudio / Semantica Productions

A Tale of Two Seeds: Sound and Silence in Latin America’s Andean Plains

(Ars Electronica)

Another person I had the pleasure of meeting in Bogotá was sound artist Juan Cortes. Juan’s most recent work A Tale of Two Seeds: Sound and Silence in Latin America’s Andean Plains was voted the winner of the prestigious Ars Electronica prize for Digital Musics and Sound Art in 2023. It deals specifically with the impact of soy monoculture on soil health in Colombia’s eastern plains, where large-scale agro-industrial incursions have degraded and eroded the land with alarming speed. Here, Juan explores the topics of contemporary techno-colonialism through the relationship between the soy crop seed and the indigenous amaranth plant which, prior to being designated a parasite, played a crucial role for indigenous communities in the region. It’s a fascinating and complex topic - one which I’ll get into with Juan in more detail when our interview is published - but for now this video gives a little bit of a taster of how he’s using sound to highlight and articulate a largely invisible phenomenon.

Various Artists

New Chronologies of Sound

(VIC NIC)

In Medellín, I was fortunate enough to spend the afternoon with Jorge Barco, a sound artist, hydrophone/instrument maker, and curator at the brilliant Museo de Arte Moderno Medellín (MAMM). The programme Jorge curates at MAMM constitutes the only full-time dedicated sound art space in a major institution in Latin America, and when I visited there was an installation by Portuguese collective Sonoscopia on display. In 2021, Barco curated this compilation, New Chronologies of Sound, gathering sound works by artists and researchers from across the globe, including Lawrence English, Matthew Herbert, Laura Romero and Budhaditya Chattopadhyay. Again, a full interview with Jorge is forthcoming, but for now this is a great introduction to the context in which he works.

Lucrecia Dalt & Aaron Dilloway

Field Recordings in the forest of Colombia

(Self-released)

OK, so I didn’t meet Lucrecia Dalt or Aaron Dilloway while I was in Colombia, but this collection of field recordings did accompany my research and felt too relevant not to include. Made during a residency in Guachalito on Colombia’s pacific coast, they capture both the natural environment and their own presence in playful and arresting ways. Born in Colombia and now living in Berlin, Dalt’s work has always appealed to me, not least her fantastic 2022 album ¡Ay! . The 20-minute opening track, which tracks the transition from day to night - or from bird song to cicadas - is highly immersive, particularly on headphones.

Various Artists

Sounds of North American Frogs

(Smithsonian Folkways)

In the town of Villa de Leyva, about three hours outside Bogotá, you will find the Instituto Humboldt’s Colección de Sonidos Ambientales - the largest archive of nature recordings in Latin America. There’s so much to say about this place which I will share in more detail in the coming weeks. One of the biologists who showed me around was Eliana Barona-Cortes, who specialises in frogs. This contribution is for her.

How many recordings of frogs are too many recordings? For herpetologist Charles M. Bogert, 92 seemed just about right. Smithsonian Folkways has a large collection of nature recordings in its archives, many of which are now slowly being made available again. That this album was first released in 1958 speaks to just how important acoustic archives such as these can be for tracking changes in biodiversity. The frog sounds themselves might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but there’s something oddly captivating about these grunts, trills and croaks, not least when accompanied by Mr. Bogert’s bone-dry observations. What a relief - finally, a clear explanation of the difference between the ‘Rain Song of a Squirrel Treefrog’ and the ‘Warning Croak of a Florida Gopher Frog’.

Additional listening:

• The Museo del Oro (Museum of Gold) in Bogotá is maybe the most impressive museum I’ve ever visited. Among the Pre-Columbian artefacts are musical instruments, including these flutes from the Caribbean plains, which date back to the time of the Conquest in the 16th century. Here you can watch them being played by two museum attendants wearing blue plastic gloves. As the video announces: “This is what the notes of the Caribbean plains sounded like in the past!”

Open calls / residencies / jobs:

• CRiSAP (Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice) at University of the Arts London has announced In The Field 2, a symposium planned for July 2024 to tackle new questions arising from the practice of field recording. The first iteration of In the Field formed the basis of a great book of interviews, which was a big influence on me getting into all this stuff. The deadline for proposals in 6th February 2024. More info on how to apply here.

• Sonic Acts’ The Muddy Muddy Mystery Tour with Cocky Eek is looking for artists working with sound, listening, ecology and sensorial experiences to take part in a workshop exploring the salt marshes at the Wadden Sea, in the north of the Netherlands, otherwise known as “the largest unbroken system of intertidal sand and mud flats in the world.” More info here.

• The International Institute of Acoustics and Vibration are accepting abstracts for their 30th anniversary congress in Amsterdam this July. More info here.

• Bothy Project in Scotland has a few days left for applications on their self-directed residencies in a really very pretty off-grid cabin on the Isle of Eigg in the Hebrides. More info here.

• And finally… New year, new you? The Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ) are looking for an underwater sound AI engineer to help them build a new library of underwater recordings from the North Sea.

Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear

For Alicia M. Quesnel, MD

i

When you open my ear, touch it
gently.
My mother’s voice lingers somewhere inside.
Her voice is the echo that helps recover my equilibrium
when I feel dizzy during my attentiveness.

You may encounter songs in Arabic,
poems in English I recite to myself,
or a song I chant to the chirping birds in our backyard.

When you stitch the cut, don’t forget to put all these back in my ear.
Put them back in order as you would do with books on your shelf.

ii

The drone’s buzzing sound,
the roar of an F-16,
the screams of bombs falling on houses,
on fields, and on bodies,
of rockets flying away—
rid my small ear canal of them all.

Spray the perfume of your smiles on the incision.
Inject the song of life into my veins to wake me up.
Gently beat the drum so my mind may dance with yours,
my doctor, day and night.

-	Mosab Abu Toha, 2021 [Source: Poetry Foundation]

There have been many shocking stories to emerge from Gaza in the past month, but one which stuck with me was a post on Instagram that was shared from a man who said he had learned to identify the degree of imminent danger he was in by distinguishing between the sounds of different types of bomb, drone, shell or artillery fire heading his way.

As someone who has never experienced this, I am in no position to write about its effects. The sonic impact of this and other conflicts is rarely, and perhaps rightly not, the focus of attention. However, in Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha’s poem above and in the accounts of others on the ground in Gaza, there is something particularly urgent and distressing about descriptions of auditory assault that is impossible to ignore. Maybe to witness a bomb strike with your eyes is to know you have survived. To hear it approaching is to fear you may not.  

Several months ago, a friend put me onto a book called Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma and Survival in Wartime Iraq, by J. Martin Daughtry. In the introduction, Daughtry states his intention to explore “violence through the prism of sound and sound through the prism of violence,” speaking to both civilians and the military who experienced what he calls the “belliphonic” sounds of the war in Iraq. (Belliphonic combines the Latin word for war [bellum] and the Greek word for voice [phone]). That is, “the imagined total of sounds that would not have occurred had the conflict not taken place.”

The book contains a number of fragments – first-person accounts of the sounds of war - which give a sense of what it meant to listen to the conflict for one’s own survival. The first fragment comes from a young Baghdadi engineer called Ali S. Like the man whose post I’d seen on Instagram, Ali had learned to read the behaviour of missiles from their sounds.

Describing the moment before a building nearby was hit, he says:

“The cruise missile flies horizontal, [at a] maximum [height of] 20 meters … And then it goes up, and then it [he uses his hand and makes the shhhhhhhhhh sound with his mouth to indicate that the missile ascends sharply; then he falls silent and tilts his fingers downward to show how it cuts its motor, and in freefall] hits the building from above. So you can hear the sound of the missile coming [horizontally] … And once you start not hearing the sound, it means it’s coming down … When it goes down, there is no sound. So after you hear the ‘shhhhhhhhhh’ you have two seconds to … predict that there’s gonna be an earthquake. [He chuckles at his turn of phrase.]”

The attempt to theorise listening in the context of ongoing destruction feels woefully inadequate. In Daughtry’s words however, it does offer a new perspective on “the directed but immersive nature of violence, the expansive but unequal distribution of victimhood, and the ever-present potential for violence and aggression that lurks within sound itself.”

From those close to me who have been in war zones or undergone Hostile Environment Awareness Training (HEAT), listening is spoken of as the primary sense of danger perception, whether identifying instructions within air raid sirens or understanding the types and trajectories of incoming fire. If the shooting sounds regular it could be a training exercise, if it’s erratic, seek shelter.

Daughtry continues: “While the auditory dimension of war is much more central than most people realize … it also allows one to gesture toward the totality of war’s pansensorial onslaught and long half-life, the “excess of evil” that will always evade description.”

In the last few days, news surfaced that Mosab Abu Toha was detained on his way to the Rafah crossing in the south of Gaza, where he and his family were on the list to be allowed safe passage to Egypt. [He has since been released.] Abu Toha has won awards in the US, was a finalist in the National Book Critics Circle prize, founded Gaza’s only English-language library and has been writing about the war for The New Yorker.

In a piece written just two weeks ago, Abu Toha recounts how his sister had asked him to warn her of falling bombs so that she could cover her ears. “My ears are aching,” she says. He and his family had taken refuge in the Jabalia camp, suspecting that they would be safer there than in their own homes. One afternoon, Abu Toha returned to see if he could salvage some of his books.

“As I approach the wrecked area of my house, I stop in a panic—not only because of the scene but also because of the sounds of drones and jet planes and bombs falling on nearby neighborhoods,” he writes, echoing the 2021 poem with which this post began. One thing is now different. “I plan to go back through the wreckage for my books and rescue whatever I can. I will not put them on bookshelves this time.”

Mosab Abu Toha’s collection Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza was published in 2022 by City Lights.

Hachirōgata Lake was once the second largest lake in Japan. About 20km outside of Akita City in the north-west of the country, this brackish body of water is named after the legend of Hachirō who, having been transformed into a dragon, made this low-lying pool his home. Attracted to a dragon residing in a nearby lake, he upped sticks and left, causing Hachirōgata to become shallower and freeze over in his absence. Hachirōgata is now only the 18th largest lake in Japan, but it wasn’t all the dragon’s fault.

In 1954, Dutch engineers Pieter Jansen and Adriaan Volker were employed by the Japanese government to oversee the drainage of the lake and reclaim almost 80% of its surface area for rice cultivation. Work began in 1957 and eleven years later, the first families were moved into the newly formed Ōgata Village on what was once the lake’s western shore. A 370-metre-long tide gate to the south and subsequent desalination transformed Hachirōgata’s remaining 4,564 hectares from brackish to fresh water, at the expense of what was once a thriving fishing community. A shrine still stands honouring the god Hachiryu for their good catches, alongside a stone monument to appease the ghosts of the fish they caught. As the seaweed died out, opportunities for the collection of shijimi shells - or Japanese basket clams - did too. Today, tourists come to catch black bass, but there is concern for the impact this interloper might have on the area’s remaining indigenous species.

From above, the lake is barely recognisable as such. Its sharp edges and man-made tributaries make it look like the wrong half of a chicken’s wish bone. To many, the once imposing lagoon, named after its draconic forefather, is now known in denuded terms as “Hachirōgata Regulating Pond”. The reclaimed land of Ōgata that sits where the lake once was is a patchworked farmland with a population of almost 3,000. At 4 meters below sea level, Wikipedia calls Hachirōgata “the lowest natural point in Japan,” but just now natural it is remains unclear.

—

Sound artist and musician Chihei Hatakeyama’s Hachirōgata Lake begins with the sound of footsteps and gunshots. Despite the droning crickets and chirps from assorted water birds, we are immediately reminded that this is a human landscape. That the opening track is called ‘By The Pond’ lends a quotidian air to the scene. By track two however, Hatakeyama has ascended from the earthly, as waves of ambient electronic synthesis merge with his recordings of the lake’s lapping shore to take the listener into the imagined world of what Hachirōgata may have once been.

When lakes are drained, soil shovelled and landscape reformed, so are its ecosystems and the sounds they produce altered. In making recordings of the drainage channels, the Ōgata bridge, grassland conservation reserves and elsewhere, Hatakeyama creates his response to the lake from its contemporary soundscape. The sloshing water of ‘Lakeside’ is passive in its rhythm, an open, expansive domesticity. We can’t know what it would have sounded like eighty years ago, but there is something inescapably elegiac about Hatakeyama’s gentle compositions.

One of the more unusual premises for a project, Hachirōgata Lake is the second release in Field Records’ series, supported by the Dutch embassy in Tokyo, exploring Japan and the Netherlands' shared approach to water management. Despite being closed to the Western world during the 17th and 18th centuries, a Dutch trading post in the bay of Nagasaki provided a crucial point of contact between Japan and the scientific developments abroad. When the Meiji Restoration in the 19th century ushered in a period of rapid industrialisation, it was often the Dutch who were called upon.

One large-scale infrastructure project of the time was that of the Tone River, which stretches 322km across the main island of Honshu and is regarded as one of Japan’s three great rivers. With the help of Dutch civil engineer Anthonie Rouwenhorst Mulder, the previously unruly river was brought to heel, dramatically altering its route and creating an artificial watershed to protect the surrounding areas from constant flooding.

The Tone River was the subject of the first album in this series. Produced by electronic musician and composer Sugai Ken, it featured regular, binaural and underwater microphones from three points along the Tone, “to express the change in landscape of the river in its flow into the Pacific Ocean.” The result is at once more abstract and more literal than Hatakeyama’s lake album, juxtaposing often spikey and sparse synthesis with unedited field recordings. With track names like ‘Environmental Sounds At Erosion Control Weir’, Ken seems more averse to elegy.

—

Hachirōgata Lake and Tone River are among the countless hybrid environments engineered under the premise of what has since been loosely termed ecosystem services. In her book Under a White Sky, the New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert visits several sites across the US, where initiatives to improve economic opportunities or guard against natural disaster are pursued by both exploiting and obstructing the natural flow of water.

Like John McPhee, whose 1989 book The Control of Nature she cites, Kolbert visits the Atchafalayla Basin in Louisiana where attempts to forestall and channel the Mississippi are more concerned with saving land than reclaiming it. “A Mississippi that’s been harnessed, straightened, regularized, and shackled can still exert a godlike force,” she writes. “It’s no longer exactly a river though.” So, then, a lake becomes a pond. Listening to Chihei Hatakeyama’s recordings, I wonder what force Hachiryu, the god of prosperous fishermen, still exerts over the 18th largest lake in Japan.

Images: Wikipedia CC

Hiroshi Yoshimura

Surround

(Temporal Drift)

Hiroshi Yoshimura was one of the finest composers of what is known as Kankyō Ongaku, or “environmental music”. Often commissioned to augment architectural spaces or commercial products during the prosperous pre-bubble economy of 1980s Japan, renewed interest in Kankyō Ongaku (and ambient music more broadly) has given rise to a number of compilations and reissues in recent years. Surround is one such reissue. Originally commissioned by one of Japan's largest homebuilders, Misawa Homes, as part of their Soundscape series in 1986, the music was intended to function as an “amenity” to enhance the newly built living spaces, but Yoshimura talks about it in gentler terms:

“If Surround can be listened to as music that’s as close to air itself, allowing us to enter each listener’s sound scenery, or as something that exists within a new perspective, expanding the middle ground between sound and music and transforming it into a comfortable space, it would be much appreciated. Its volume should not become a hindrance to a conversation, and should be placed in the same family of sounds as the vibration of footsteps, the hum of an air conditioner, or the clanging of a spoon inside a coffee cup. With the addition of city noise from outside the window, you may hear it in a completely new way.”

Yoshimura’s other albums, GREEN, Music for 9 Postcards and A.I.R. (commissioned by a perfume company) are also worth checking out. For more Kankyō Ongaku, here’s an interview I did with Spencer Doran, who put together a comprehensive compilation on the genre back in 2019.

Bex Burch

There is only love and fear

(International Anthem)

Bex Burch describes her approach to composition as “domestic music”, where the surrounding environment is invited in to be part of the process. Sometimes that means birdsong and rainfall, at others passing cars or tornado warning sirens. In that sense, There is only love and fear is an album that exists in physical space, where the materiality of all that resonates (whether that’s her self-built xylophone or the sound of voices nearby) is given equal stake in the recording.

On ‘Start before you’re ready’, Burch duets with the sounds around her, blurring the boundaries between what we recognise as music and sound (or perhaps even culture and nature) in the process. Performing the album live at Café Oto last week, she said she was just making public what she does in private. The impression is one of extreme intimacy, of overhearing a living music that will continue to play on long after we’ve left the room.

Action Pyramid & Jack Greenhalgh

Mardle: Daily Rhythms of a Pond

(Mappa / Skupina)

How often have you walked past a pond and thought to yourself, “I wonder what it sounds like down there?” Probably not that often. With the help of a hydrophone however, musician and field recordist Action Pyramid has done the work for you, teaming up with biologist Jack Greenhalgh to reveal the 24-hour sonic lifecycle of the UK’s freshwater ponds. “It's so exciting that we've discovered the woodland bird song dawn chorus equivalent for ponds,” Greenhalgh explains.

Rather than wrens and sparrows however, listen out here for aquatic insects, plant respiration and photosynthesis. An ecology of otherworldly rhythms and alien hyper-sounds, they feel more like early synth experiments than biological processes, and the result is quietly breathtaking.

[A full interview with Action Pyramid will be featured in Through Sounds next week.]

Galya Bisengalieva

Polygon

(One Little Independent)

“What emerges in damaged landscapes, beyond the call of industrial promise and ruin?” asks American anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt-Tsing in The Mushroom at the End of the World. On her new album, Kazakh-British composer and violinist Galya Bisengalieva heads to the Semipalatinsk nuclear testing site in the steppe of northeast Kazakhstan to offer one kind of answer. Known as ‘the Polygon’, this vast area of land was intentionally described as uninhabitable by Soviet leaders during the Cold War to justify what once constititued almost a quarter of the world’s nuclear testing, echoing the language of “sacrifice zones” regularly touted in the politics of pollution.

Bisengalieva’s album seeks to demonstrate that this land meant and continues to mean so much more, bringing into relief the ecosystems of mountains and pine forests that skirt the River Irtysh and the cultural history of an area which has contributed much to Kazakh intellectual life. “For the inhabitants, the 465 nuclear tests conducted during its existence had dire consequences on an ancient landscape that supported traditional pasturelands with little regard for their effect on the local people or the environment, leading to devastating long-term impacts,” Bisengalieva writes in Polygon’s accompanying text, providing further context for the music’s elegiac drones.

Natasha Barrett

Reconfiguring the Landscape

(Persistence of Sound)

Reviewing electroacoustic composer Natasha Barrett’s last album Heterotopia, I picked out a quote of Barrett’s that remains relevant to her latest work: “Sound is invisible,” she says, “but we can do things that make you want to reach out and touch it.” Reconfiguring The Landscape does just that, playing with 3-D compositional techniques to “evoke and provoke a new awareness of our outdoor sound environment.”

Edited together from three site-specific outdoor sound installations that Barrett produced over the last three years, the tracks find a compelling middle ground between technology and artistic practice, as church bells, children’s voices and fractured bird song swirl around your headphones.

Additional listening…

• Palestinian radio station Radio Alhara have made available a 12-hour broadcast assembled by the Learning Palestine group on the 75th anniversary of Palestinian Nakba.

• On NTS, Amar Ediriwira’s Blue Screen focusses on the launch of Edward Said’s 1986 book "After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives" at ICA in which Said spoke to Salman Rushdie about Palestinian identity, exile, return, and self-determination.

• Sonic Acts’ Overexposed podcast meets sound artist Minji Kim aka Unknown Kim to find out about her research into the sonic qualities of the Zandmotor 'sand engine' experiment in the Netherlands, featuring a particularly nice exchange about the sound of wind.

• And finally… Björk and Rosalía have released a song in protest against industrial fish farming in Iceland. “Can we stop it? Can we change it? Can we save the wild salmon of Iceland?” she asks. “The answer to all these three questions is yes, we can.” God bless you, Björk.