This is my annual post on landscape music - the earlier ones (with apologies for a few dead links now) are here:
2010,
2011,
2012. I discussed a couple of excellent records earlier in the year so won't linger over these
here:
My Garden State by
Glenn Jones and
In St Cuthbert's Time by
Chris Watson (I also
wrote about
Hiroki Sasajima's work but neglected to mention
Circle Wind, sounds recorded at night around Tokyo and other urban locations). Many of the themes I observed in 2012 were present this year too: encounters with mountains, rivers and islands; the search for politically charged sites and landscapes haunted by history; continuing attempts to expand field recording beyond simple notions of soundscape; music composed in studios or outdoors as an offshoot of wider artistic endeavours and then sold in a range of collectible formats. Particularly noticeable this year, I think, has been the way some musicians and sound artists have engaged in different forms of field work, walking the landscape and documenting their findings in film and text as well as recorded sound. The finished compositions are therefore the product of a period of research: digging in archives and libraries, investigations of particular
sites or topographical features, close observation of natural phenomena and acoustic experimentation.
Typical of this trend is an album by
The Memory Band, on whose website you can read a series of Stephen Cracknell's
Field Reports. They were made whilst exploring the South Country and composing
On the Chalk (Our Navigation of the Line of the Downs). Cracknell explains that his steps were guided by old topographical writings - Belloc, Massingham, R. Hippisley Cox’s
Green Roads Of England,
Ancient Trackways Of Wessex by H.W. Timperley & Edith Brill. On the day the record was complete he set off again on The Harrow Way, a semi-legendary ancient path: 'I walked the best part of sixty miles in those three days ending at Stonehenge, blistered and hobbled but elated.' There is a
Caught by the River review of the album by
Rob St. John in which he describes
On the Chalk as a place
'where the pastoral meets the produced, where machines (whether cars,
planes or drum machines) plough patterned furrows through rich and
partially-obscured landscapes. As Cracknell puts it in the sleeve
notes:
‘It is an album about change, the power of human will and our relationship with the landscape as we pass through it’.'
Place and its relationship to history have been the subject of another ongoing investigation by lo-fi duo
Way Through. Last year I mentioned
here seeing them play at Cafe Oto, supporting James Brooks / Land Observations, whose own landscape project was dedicated to Roman Roads (and who contributed this year to
Simon Fisher Turner's new soundtrack for
The Epic of Everest). Way Through's latest album,
Clapper is Still, includes ‘Dedham Vale’ and 'Eyam', songs about two very different villages preserved as heritage sites, 'Sipson', on a site that is, in contrast, under threat from the expansion
of Heathrow Airport, and ‘Imber and Tyneham’, referring to places that were cleared of their inhabitents during World War Two
(the latter is Patrick Wright's 'Village that Died for England'). Rob
St. John has reviewed this one as well for
Caught by the River: 'lyrics cribbed from local history leaflets, information boards and bus
stop graffiti become spoken and sung invocations of the sublime, the
suburban and the specific. Chiming, often-dissonant guitar gusts off
into post-punk angles: plotting new cartographical soundings over old
ground.'
Rob St. John himself has been exploring Edinburgh's waterways, documenting his researches as
a 7" single with accompanying essays and prints. This was part of the
Year of Natural Scotland, for which numerous artists seem to have been making work in 2013, navigating a system of funding streams as complex as the lochs, drains, springs and sewers of the city.
Chris Dooks was another sound artist involved in this, with a film,
Tiny Geographies and accompanying
soundtrack; he has also recently completed
Ciga{r}les, a set of
treated field recordings made partly for therapeutic reasons (I think the looped voices on the former and combination of bagpipes and cicadas on the latter may not appeal to everyone). Although the Natural Scotland projects sound interesting, they make you wonder how far records themselves can be appreciated out of context. To stand on its own, a set of sound recordings need to be reorientated:
Geoff Mullen's
Filtered Water for example, is two long pieces derived from a 'multi-channel sound installation in the backwoods of
Hudson Valley', converted into a mono recording. Similarly,
Jem Finer and
Andrew Kötting's Visionary Seascapes is more than simply the soundtrack to the film they made last year with Iain Sinclair,
Swandown.
Pilgrim Chants & Pastoral Trails by
Sharron Kraus is another album dedicated to a specific landscape. One sunny day, she writes, whilst driving through the Welsh countryside, "I had the overwhelming sense that there was music contained in the landscape, waiting to be discovered. I decided to move to Mid-Wales, to a quiet place just north of that valley and try to tap into that music and draw it out." The resulting compositions couldn't be less like Way Through; Joseph Stannard in
The Wire praised their 'wild magic and windswept beauty.' Kraus cites
Richard Skelton as an influence, and this year he has been re-visiting music inspired by the landscape of Ulpha, in south-west Cumbria. These kind of recordings, like field notes or diaries, can be returned to and developed in new ways. He
and
Autumn Richardson describe the composition of
Succession in almost scientific terms: 'the process of recovering
these fragments and threading them into song is analogous to the work of
palynologists, reconstructing images of past landscape ecologies from
the layers of sediment. It is a kind of archaeology, a work of
archivism.'
Swiss sound artist
Marcus Maeder has been leading '
trees',
a research project conducted by the Institute for Computer Music and
Sound Technology (ICST) in collaboration with the Swiss Federal
Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL). Their aim is
to 'combine field recordings of meteorological phenomena, recordings of
acoustic emissions in trees and acoustic representations (sonifications)
of ecophysiological data in one single auditory experience and make
their correlation acoustically and aesthetically experienceable and
explorable.' Some of this sounds like the old dream of listening to the
landscape directly, an idea I have often referred to here (see for
example my post from earlier this year,
Shoreless River). Maeder's own CD,
topographie sinusoïdale, constructs music as if it were a landscape: '
arranged in space, defining
upper and lower boundaries of spatial objects, cliffs, edges, slow
passages from one scene to another, at times focusing on details of a
larger group of objects.' Reviewing it recently in The Wire,
Richard Pennell found it 'a very pretty, gently fluid piece of music,
but a little too anodyne, an overlong watercolour wash.'
The same could not be said for
Emptyset -
Paul Purgas and James Ginzburg
- who specialise in subjecting resonant sites to noise at high volumes and
frequencies and recording the results. At the start of the year they
had an installation at Tate Britain as part of the Performing Architecture series. Here's what Boomkat had to say about their latest release, Material: 'In what has become the dominant theme of Emptyset's work, the cavernous architecture of the different settings - Trawsfynydd
Nuclear Power Station in Snowdonia, Ambika P3 in London, and Chislehurst
Mine in Kent - becomes a component of the music itself, the duo's
bowel-shaking low frequencies responding to every nook, curve and
surface texture of these man-made caves. When you think of the uses
these spaces have historically been put to (chalk and flint mining,
Magnox nuclear reaction, concrete testing), it's hard to think of
Material as anything but industrial music in its purest, or at least
most literal, form.'
Touch always feature in my annual surveys, and a new
BJ Nilson
album coming out shortly sounds interesting - 'a somewhat surreal audio
rendition of the sounds of The City of London.' Earlier in the year they released
Diluvial, a collaboration between Wire's
Bruce Gilbert and Beaconsfield ArtWorks on the theme of rising sea levels. Another album of note was
Burkhard Stangl's
Unfinished. For William Turner, painter, inspired by the artist's extraordinary late work (Tate Britain has an exhibition planned for next year,
Late Turner: Painting Set Free, so I expect to see this CD on sale in their shop). Then there was
Stromboli, a collection of field recordings by
Geir Jenssen, better known as Biosphere for his 'arctic techno' - most recently
N-Plants
(2011), an album inspired by the Japanese nuclear industry and recorded
a month before the Fukashima disaster. Jenssen has also been
active in mountaineering and in 2001 climbed the Himalayan peak Cho
Oyu. The sounds he assembled on that expedition were released a few
years later as
Cho Oyu 8201m – Field Recordings from Tibet. The
new album for Touch consists of a Stromboli soundscape on the first
side and a 'dub version' (subtly different) on the other.
Another volcanic area, Lyttelton, on the South Island of New Zealand, has been explored by Jo Burzynska, who records as
Stanier Black-Five. For her album
Avast! 'sounds were captured at sites around the natural amphitheatre of this extinct caldera: from abandoned wartime bunkers on the top of the crater rim to the port and its cacophony of cargo ships, tugs and workshops.' This area was also the epicentre of the earthquake that hit Christchurch in 2011. Burzynska 'grabbed a recording device as she ran from her home, leaving it running on her doorstep capturing the aftershocks that ricocheted though her house and the disaster unfolding on the street outside.' These sounds were then used in the album
Body Waves, a collaboration with Malcolm Riddoch (whose exotic pseudonym is Zeug Gezeugt). Reading about some of these sound artists, I sometimes end up thinking I'm in the wrong line of work... Jo Burzynska manages to combine field recording with being a wine writer and this summer created a '
multi-sensory sound and wine installation' for an event called Oenosthesia in Auckland.
It is impossible here to cover all the significant field recordings released in 2013 - hopefully
The Field Reporter will put together a survey like they did
last year. However, I'd like to mention two of the organisers of
In the Field, the symposium I attended in February, who have releases out this year:
Cathy Lane, who has brought together interviews, archive recordings and natural sounds in
The Hebrides Suite (see 'On the Machair', above) and
Ian Rawes, who has put together together
a record of some highlights from his
London Sound Survey. Last year Ian's British Library colleague Cheryl Tipp gave me some suggestions for notable releases to mention here. This year she has drawn my attention to
Luis Antero's project
O Rio / the River. The
first part is a confluence of water sounds recorded along the Alvoco
river in Portugal. The newly issued second instalment documents the
memories of an old river-keeper and three villagers who talk about the
disused watermills. The Impulsive Habitat label that put out Antero's
recordings (run by David Velez, who set up
The Field Reporter) has dealt in a
diverse range of soundscapes this year:
the Madagascan rainforest, the
Parque Nacional Natural Los Nevados in Columbia, the
Crack of Humahuaca in Argentina, the road
between Takasaki and Tokyo, the platforms of
Union Station in Kansas City, and the 'grimy laneways' of
inner Sydney Camperdown.
Back in 2010 I devoted
a post here to the music of
John Luther Adams, including
Inuksuit,
a composition designed to be played and heard out in the landscape.
Cantaloupe, the label run by Bang on a Can, have now put this out on CD
for the first time: a recording made in the forest surrounding
Guilford Sound in Guilford, Vermont. Back in July, Ivan Hewitt
interviewed Adams and it is worth reading his account of experiencing
Inuksuit among the beech trees at the University of Richmond.
Having
reached a crescendo the music subsided, the musicians went their
separate ways and the audience 'ambled out into the trees and
along the lake, pausing to listen to a vibraphone player here, a
flautist
there. Waves of sound rose, changed colour very slowly, and passed
through
the trees. Eventually they dispersed, but one couldn’t be sure for
some time
that the music was finally over.'
There are still composers writing more traditional
programmatic music inspired by nature:
Jennifer Higdon for example, whose
An Exaltation of Larks and
Sky Quartet
appeared this year (she can be heard on the
Q2 music Soundcloud site introducing her music, including
other landscape related compositions like 'City Scape', 'Summer
Shimmers', 'Autumn Reflexions' and 'Dooryard Bloom', a
setting of Walt Whitman). There is landscape too in the poetry of
Ted Kooser, whose words were put to music this year by
Dawn Upshaw and
Maria Schneider for their song cycle
Winter Morning Walks. Personally I would rather listen to
Hirta Songs, a collaboration between
Alasdair Roberts and
Robin Robertson (whose poetry and compelling voice I have referred to
here before). Robertson has written self-deprecatingly in
The Guardian that the poem he wrote after visiting the island of St Kilda was 'really just
a list of place names' - 'although it gave some sense of the scale of
the place, and allowed for
the sea-rhythms, the poem had lots of topography, but no real
narrative.' So he got together with Roberts to work up a set of folk
songs and tell the island's stories, but that original poem, 'Leaving St
Kilda', remains in the middle of the album, read to the accompaniment of
Corrina Hewat's gentle harp.
Musical collaboration increasingly occurs remotely over the internet: one example from 2013 was
Temperament as Waveform by field recordists
Lee Patterson and Vanessa Rossetto. It was interesting therefore to
read that
Taylor Deupree and Australian Cameron Webb (
Seaworthy) deliberately went to great lengths to meet and walk together the snow before composing
Wood, Winter, Hollow. Deupree prefers 'the human interaction and local
landscapes over the soulless exchange of sound files.' So 'the pair struck out in a New York February
to a 4,000 acre nature preserve near Deupree’s studio called Ward Pound
Ridge, a park rich in history that supports a diverse range of plant
and animal life. While the cold of winter kept most of the animals quiet
the landscape nonetheless teemed with sounds.' They recorded raindrops on stone, wind in the beech trees and a creak slowly flowing through ice. Later, in the warmth of the studio, these were combined with bells, sticks, melodica, analog synthesiser and the gentle sound of Seaworthy's guitar. The result (see below) is quite different from '
Rusted Oak', Deupree's ambient soundscape that I featured in my 2010 Landscape Music round-up.
Field of Reeds,
These New Puritans' follow-up to
Hidden (NME's album of the year for 2010) has been a difficult one for reviewers to get their heads round. It has been interesting to see it described by some critics as if it were another exploration of Essex (
the 'new English landscape', according to Ken Worpole's recent book). Here is Luke Turner, writing for
The Quietus... 'The estuarine landscape of
Field Of Reeds is best seen in two
ways: in grand panorama from an aircraft banking over London, when sun
glints off the water of the Thames widening toward the North Sea. Or, on
the other hand, oozy intimacy along the rough shoreline, traditionally a
site for dumping the waste of London. Here, alongside creeks where air
bubbles rattle from the mud with the ebbing tide, a rutted horizon
offers up gifts of ancient marmalade pots, broken clay pipes, fused and
rusted metal. It's a landscape that refuses, like memory or dreams, to
be defined or contained, that forever shifts and opens itself up to new
narratives and fresh explorations.'
With both musicians and reviewers taking inspiration from the new nature writers and psychogeographers, it was no real surprise earlier this year to come across a project directly influenced by W. G. Sebald. I can't now recall the exact circumstances in which I initially read
The Rings of Saturn back in 1995, but it would have been in my first flat, at the
top of a house in Tufnell Park. I imagine my concentration was occasionally broken by the sound of baselines throbbing from the flat below, owned by record producer Dilip Harris. Now, all these years later, I see that he and Rob Gallagher of Galliano have assumed the joint identity
William Adamson and recorded
Under An East Coast Moon, an album that draws 'inspiration from the Suffolk landscape – ancient burial grounds,
fortifications against Nazi invaders, sea defences now inadequate
against global warming and forests felled by the great storm of 1987.' Its 'cautionary tales of
fallen women, folk songs and gothic legends fuse with reflections and
refractions from W. G. Sebald’s book
The Rings of Saturn.'
Well that'll probably do for now, but feel free to comment below on the interesting landscape related music I have neglected to mentioned. I'll end this post with the trailer for The Epic of Everest, scored by Simon Fisher Turner.
