If John Muir was the proto-phonographer of nature, the model of a writer who strives to capture the world of sound with his words, he arguably had his equal in a fellow activist several decades his junior whose professional life overlapped with his own. Upton Sinclar, in The Jungle, among other works of creative muckracking, proved himself Muir’s match, the distinction being that Sinclair was an industrial mouse to Muir’s pastoral mouse. Muir is likely more often cited because descriptions of verdant national parks make better yearbook epigraphs than does reportage from slaughterhouse killing floors. But there is no less poetry, no less insight, to Sinclair’s ear. By way of example, this is from an early scene in The Jungle:
Then the party became aware of another strange thing. This, too, like the odor, was a thing elemental; it was a sound, a sound made up of ten thousand little sounds. You scarcely noticed it at first — it sunk into your consciousness, a vague disturbance, a trouble. It was like the murmuring of the bees in the spring, the whisperings of the forest; it suggested endless activity, the rumblings of a world in motion. It was only by an effort that one could realize that it was made by animals, that it was the distant lowing of ten thousand cattle, the distant grunting of ten thousand swine.
The passage came to mind while listening, on repeat, to LuÃs Antero‘s Factory Music, a half hour of recordings made in a factory town in Portugal (MP3). The sound quality is high, and the range of captured audio is remarkable for the distinction and variety.
http://www.wanderingear.com/we016/we016-Lu%eds_Antero-01-Factory_Music.mp3|titles=”Lupita”|artists=LuÃs Antero]
These are some favorite moments:
03:24 downtempo routine
06:44 intense grinding
07:46 whole lotta buzzing going on
13:20 wash of whir with bell-like overtone
14:09 pneumatic rhythm of steamy minimal techno
More on the recording at its releasing netlable, wanderingear.com. More on Antero at luisantero.yolasite.com.
Italianate guitar is heard between a creaky door and train-station bells, and just above a foundation bed of vinyl surface noise. Wells of low-pressure feedback and heavily echoed piano make themselves heard. This is “Rumore del Roma,” off Recollage by Erik Nilsson. The title track is no different: same spaghetti western trip-hop vibe, all silverware percussion and romanticly strummed guitar, bonded by a heavy, slow bass line and made all the more enticing by occasions of whirry electric currents. The effect — a kind of frontier steampunk, all gunslinger accents and electronica undercurrent, broken-knuckle castanets and backward-masked samples — reaches its greatest achievement here on “Old Piano/Bad Back,” in which the six string is put on a loop that has just enough of an overlay to mark it as artificial (deliciously so), and punctuated with snippets of dialog and clockwork. The whole collection is tremendous. 
It’s not uncommon that the initial release from a new netlabel is by the musician who founded the netlabel. It was the case with recently with Davin Sarno’s 
There are countless forms of musical collaboration, and one of the most intimate would be the situation when one musician processes, live, the sounds of another. Such activities date back at least as early as Brian Eno’s role during live performances by Roxy Music, and today flower in the realms of microsound and the electronic fringes of free improvisation. To take one musician’s sonic emissions and, as they occur, reshape them is something akin to being a live-action dramaturge: interpreting in real time. Back in November of last year, British musician Simon Whetham, who has a specialization in field recordings, was preparing a performance at the adventurous Prague gallery Å kolská 28. Scheduling and shared interests put him in touch, thanks to the gallery’s director, MiloÅ¡ VojtÄ›chovský, with Michael Delia, a U.S. musician who resides at times in the city. Their performance, which was recorded and later made available for free download as an 
Whether or not one can judge a book or an album by its cover, we are, as listeners on the web, often left to categorize a recording of abstract sound by its tags. In the case of the rudimentary titled “Tape (Mix 3),” these tags would be “cassettes,” “tape,” “cut,” “paste,” collage,” “recorder,” “free,” “abstract,” “tapes,” “machine,” “voices,” “machines,” and, most curiously by far, “grandpa,” in addition to the last name of the musician responsible for it, Michael Banabila of Rotterdam in the Netherlands. The tags were applied to the track when Banabila made it publicly accessible, and they make certain things clear: this is a tape-splice endeavor, with abstraction as its goal. Small bits of sound are cut and pasted like letters on a ransom note. The result is, indeed, a collage, one in which voices, among other things, are heard in layers. Despite a predilection for abstraction, simple repeated motives lend it a pop-like appeal. It may not have the rhythmic gusto of an early dorm-room Beastie Boys concoction, but it has something of a beat, and there’s a droning quality that lends a foundation to all the clipped aural material.