The recent slew of tracks uploaded by Phillip Wilkerson to his soundcloud.com/phillipwilkerson account have titles like something out of an ancient haiku practice, albeit one situated in modern Florida. There’s “Osprey at Pine Island FL” and “Midnight Rain at Naples FL” and “Thunder in the Ebb at N Ft Myers,” not to mention the more explicitly contemporary “My Afternoon Commute at Naples Florida.” Most recent is “Sunday Morning Sounds at Palm Island, FL,” which is simply a steady combination of whole-earth white nose and occasional bird song. That’s “simply” as in “elegantly,” not “simply” as in “This is all you have to offer?” It isn’t so much bird song as bird speak, not the full-on melodic enchantment of birds, but the quotidian calls of birds going about their business, which the more melodic bird song is likely as well, but here it is the truly mundane bird call, the one that settles in the background — which Wilkerson has teased into the foreground by recording two solid minutes of it, and making it available separate from its natural environment. The ending of his recording is quite sudden, a file trimmed so immediately it almost recommends the fade out by comparison, but the hard cut is the right approach; it’s a wake-up call from the reverie.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/phillipwilkerson. More on Wilkerson at phillipwilkerson.com.
