Disquiet

The German label at gruenrekorder.de has described itself as focusing on “audioart and field recordings.” Its sizeable website recordings include such categories as “sample poetry” and “bioacoustic compositions,” the latter featuring work that builds on tapes of, among other things, bat sounds. Lasse-Marc Riek‘s “Feeding Buzz 02″ (MP3) shifts the bats’ ultrasonic emissions into human hearing range, and apparently uses a spatial analogy to transform the bats’ motion into music; the result is a mysterious flurry of movement, appropriately creepy given the source. Two other Riek tracks, “Reitende Hoehlentiere” (MP3) and “Modulierte Echtzeittiere” (MP3), mix these adjusted-spectrum sounds with recognizable real-world material, like industrial sounds and dog barks, and with bat noise that would be plainly evident to the human ear, such as the sound of chirping between parent and child bat.

By Marc Weidenbaum