One of the interesting things about the sharing of field recordings is that the audience for these recordings has such a different experience of the recordings from that of the recordist. When Alasdair Pettinger, for example, emerged from the Glasgow tunnel that is the source of his recent soundcloud.com post, he had a personal memory of the original experience. The recording of that experience would both remind him of it, and be unfamiliar, and the gap between those two appreciations would be as much a source of fascination as would be the details in the recording itself. He would, as do we all when revisiting field recordings, listen for what he recalled, and be engaged by what he had not previously noticed.
Pettinger, who records as Bulldozia, describes the incident of the recording as follows:
Pausing mid-way through the foot- and cycle-tunnel under the road tunnel under the Clyde, listening to the cars passing overhead and the gushing of an overflowing drain. Is there a better way to spend a wet Sunday? Recorded 11 September 2011.
He has an apparent fondness for insular spaces, as evidenced by an earlier recording by him mentioned here back in May (“The Sonic Signature of Democracy”). That was the rough yet quiet noise of a voting booth. This time it is the metronome rhythm of a tunnel, its urban pulse evident in those vertical striations of its waveform, shown above.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/bulldozia. More on Pettinger/bulldozia at bulldozia.com and twitter.com/bulldozia. (Above tunnel photo via flickr.com and Creative Commons.)
Spirituals are about faith, and so it is a leap of faith that one takes when absorbing the deep dark drone that is Crypsis, a recent single-track release by Horchata. This is because the Crypsis drone, solitary and harmonically dense as it appears to be, reportedly was derived from spirituals. “Each of the song elements, there are 10 of them in this long one-hour ambient song, are from popular spirituals,” explains Horchata in a brief liner note at the releasing netlabel, 
There is a whole subgenre of latter-day trip-hop that melds the kind of reflective moodiness perpetrated by Ennio Morricone in classic movie scores and the loop-focused efforts of bedroom beatmakers. The situation, the correlation, between Morricone’s music and studio beats may be the result of a simple conflation in the public imagination, since both Morricone’s work and dub music, a key part of trip-hop’s origin, have the meldodica as one of their constituent parts. And, of course, both traffic in somber melodrama. Still, there’s no melodica in “New World,” one of the keeper tracks on Frenic‘s recent EP, Lessons from the Past (