Here’s some salt that’s good for the diet. The listening diet, that is. The latest raw field recording from the wanderingear.com netlabel is a 20-minute exercise in cavern tourism. The recording was made in the Salina Praid salt mine, located in rural Romania. The entry’s title, “Subterranean Salt Echoes,” notes its most telling feature and [...]
You come home from a holiday, your camera loaded with images, and after one or two key shots are sent to relatives, and a handful more are uploaded to some image-sharing website, the whole bunch are consigned to the dustless bin of your external harddrive. Now, say you travel with a microphone instead of a [...]
Nothing like a little cross-pollination. The Wandering Ear netlabel got its start as a pure-sound alternative project by the folks who’d earlier started the Dark Winter netlabel. While Dark Winter (at darkwinter.com) focused on studio concoctions, Wandering Ear (wanderingear.com) presented field recordings in all their unadulterated, raw goodness. Its first four entries included motor boats [...]
Many netlabels are devoted to electronic music, and much of that music is based on field recordings, but few of those netlabels are devoted to field recordings. Enter wanderingear.com, the most recent release on which, Lori Beckstead and Dave Rose’s Winanga-li: Australian Soundscapes, includes bird calls at dawn, frogs after rainfall and, the real keeper, [...]
Among the many overused words in the description of drones is “quotidian.” It suggests daily experience so pervasive as to have become nearly invisible, but such a word, and such an experience, best sums up much of the sound art perpetrated by Pete Kemble as part of his ongoing “The Heard World” series on the [...]
Just about every week, Aaron Ximm uploads a new sound recording to his quietamerican.org-based series, One-Minute Vacations. They’re submitted by travellers who are as likely to carry MiniDisc recorders as they are cameras. Among the recent entries are a nightscape from Zion National Park (MP3), by Joshua Manchester; an Easter ceremony from Vietnam (MP3), by [...]
Chris Herbert, who’s based in Birmingham, England, was invited by Resonance FM to create an original sound collage stitched together from field recordings near the city’s waterways. The realworld noise was taped in what’s been described as a series of “sound walks” around his place of employment. Kranky Records, the label that released Herbert’s fine [...]
There’s so much of interest broadcast on Resonance FM that it’s almost absurd. Segments pop up as part of the website/radio station’s podcast, including, in mid-July, a segment of Pete Kemble’s show, The Heard World. An entry titled “A Collection of Distorted Noises” is exactly that, with Kimball fracturing the sounds of a preacher and [...]
The remix section of the freesound website (at freesound.iua.upf.edu) is somewhat misnamed. It isn’t really a tree, per se, in that rarely if ever is a remix of an original sample itself remixed. In other words, for a tree it’s sorta flat. The majority of material in the freesound remix section is second-generation renditions of [...]
Alessandro Bosetti went to Africa and, like many travelers, he brought along some CDs. He also brought along some recording equipment. He played the CDs — which contained largely abstract music by the likes of Kevin Drumm, Ryoji Ikeda and Harry Partch — for locals and he recorded their responses. Then he grafted the two [...]