File under: Trails and Influences. Other Pathways. Case #52/52.
(Retransmission:) If you should look closely amongst this particular year in the country you may well see that around these parts there has been activity which has involved the encasing of disturbances in the airwaves.
Audiological Reflections and Pathways is inspired by those particular encasings and the related work/creators of said work…
Along which lines, Racker&Orphan’s Twalif X.
When I think of the creation of Twalif X – essentially a night long field recording of explorations through several forests, my mind tends to turn to other similar/interrelated work and documentation…
Cathy Lane and Angus Carlyle’s In The Field: The Art Of Field Recording – discovered by my good self via Caught By The River, wherein I learnt that “The first wildlife recording was made by a German man – Ludwig Koch – in 1889 and captured the call of a bird – the Common Shama, a member of the thrush family – onto early Edison wax cylinders.”
The album Cluster & Eno – although not so directly created as a field recording, it is here for the cover image of a lone microphone recording the sounds of the landscape and the sky, which has somewhat stayed with me over the months…
..and quite possibly the wanderings and gatherings of the film Silence:
“Eoghan is a sound recordist who is returning to Ireland for the first time in 15 years, for a job capturing noises in areas free from man-made sound. His quest takes him to remote terrain, away from towns and villages. Throughout his journey, he is drawn into a series of encounters and conversations which gradually divert his attention towards a more intangible silence, bound up with the sounds of the life he had left behind. Influenced by elements of folklore and archive, Silence unfolds with a quiet intensity, where poetic images reveal an absorbing meditation on themes relating to sound and silence, history, memory and exile.”
I think I could quite possibly include Silence in a kind of pastoral documentary-but-also-something else film mini-genre of recent years that could well also include Two Years At Sea and sleep furiously… and which stretching backwards could quite possibly include The Moon & The Sledgehammer and Akenfield…
…which could in a way be considered to be visual field trip recordings and imaginings…
…and wandering away from field recordings amongst the land, I may well wander towards Howlround’s Ghosts of Bush; in many ways this was a psychogeographic/hauntological field trip that focused on one particular building, almost a Stone Tape-esque recording of the residues of spirit and history that remain (and quietly escape) from the walls of a once transmission centre…
…and a return to Jean Richie and George Pickow’s Field Trip England – a quite lovely collection of recordings of the folk and sounds of the land, gathered on a journey around this particular corner of the world (see Day #111/365).
…or indeed a return to the explorative pathways of Wayside and Woodland’s Haunted Woodland series of releases/work:
