After a long period without releasing an album, today I’m over the moon to announce that it has happened.
Cliffs, Vultures & Cycles of Death marks a lot of my practice changes and progression. The tracks have been recorded in Spain, Portugal and France in the last 2 years.
I believe is my best work so far in many ways and I can’t wait for you all to listen to it. Use the code ‘friends’ for 40% discount until the 17th of July.
Also… important. I’m rebuilding a website from scratch. You’ll be able to navigate clean with a proper design, finally. It should be up in two weeks maximum and the domain will remain the same.
All my best to all who have been following my journey.
This is an edited repost from the original publication at earth.fm. I don’t see much of this specific content around so I thought about sharing it for those thinking about taking a new direction with their field recording journey or just open their ears to something else.
My own relationship to listening has been developing over the years since I started to record. At the very beginning, I was fascinated by a full soundscape of birdsong or cowbells in a flat landscape; I was mostly perceiving soundscapes’ melodic aspects.
For another couple of years, I kept recording but didn’t really know what to listen for; that question wasn’t even present in my mind. My approach, then, was mainly technical: choosing a ‘good’ position for the microphone setup so I could capture ‘the landscape’. Something about the entirety of a soundscape – like a panoramic picture – plus the excitement of being outdoors, made me feel that I was discovering something (but I wasn’t: everything was already there).
Movement
In 2015–16, I was the audio engineer for a documentary shoot in a private nature reserve in Sweden. Back then, I don’t think I even knew what a dawn chorus was, so I set out to listen and record anything interesting I could find, avoiding any anthropophony.
To my innocent ears, nothing special was happening – until, one afternoon, I finally listened to the wind traveling from one tall pine to another on the opposite side of the site. I heard the wind in the first tree, shaking its branches and leaves, before, shortly after, it whirled up the second pine. I can only describe it as sounding like little papers being shaken and making different tonalities and sonic colors. So, what was this all about? Movement, sound moving! It created a very strong sensation of space.
At this time, I was working actively as a sound designer and the expansiveness of the environment I found myself in was a very attractive accompaniment for footage of a natural outdoor setting. I would also be working on the post-production of this documentary, so my mind was set on the editing and sound design. Some of the principles I was going by as a sound designer influenced deeply my wishes of how I wanted my field recordings to sound like. The main principles of these are balance, movement and space.
From a distance, I could also hear a number of mallards around one of the lakes on the reserve. The geographic spaciousness that was revealed through these sounds was amazing to my ears. The mallards were loud enough that the vast surface of the lake, with its surrounding forest, was shown by a long reverb, with a harsh timbre just like the mallard call.
Distinction
Fast forward to a project in the Atlantic Forest (Brazil, 2016) that I considered to be my first ‘big’ field recording trip, where I was immediately disheartened when I set out the gear… I had a vivid memory (maybe fabricated – who knows) of a shimmering reverberating sound of tropical birds, like a fairytale. I’m sure you know what I mean.
Me in my newbie years.
But in reality, many parts of the Atlantic Forest sounded flat. Flat.
The wall of vegetation was acting as a huge sound absorber. I got my kit (and made the wrong decision), one day before I travelled from Sweden and no chance of of getting an alternative there.
First I blamed myself, of course. I felt so ashamed of my rushed and poor choice of mic setup. I needed an A/B with enough width, I thought; Nowadays I’d say I’d also need another kind of microphone that would offer more depth.
Clearly way less talent for photography, much less on an iPhone 2 or 3, but you get the idea of the density.
At some point though, I set by a lake with an open space, grass and trees surrounding. And the sound was already quite different: it was much more spacious and coming close to my own fantasy.
So, I started to look for uneven spaces, bodies of water or big rocks (scarce in the Atlantic Forest). And, one day: on top of a hill, there was a big rock, overlooking the chilling sight of the nearby city eating up the forest, which made the birds’ chirps a little more special. Finally, they were much closer to the sounds I had been imagining in my mind’s ear.
My expectations created by media (thanks…) led to a huge disappointment. But at least in the end I came to establish one aspect of natural soundscapes that strongly attracted me – the distinct reverberation of the acoustic space.
If the recordings don’t live up to your expectations, does it render them worthless?
For some time I thought so, but now I disagree. Even if most of it sounded like a blanket of foliage, a recording will always include elements which make it worthwhile and pleasant to listen to.
This recording is one of my favorite examples. Definition and spaciousness are not the best terms to describe it, but the beautiful call of the solitary tinamou (a species of ground bird) makes it all worth it, doesn’t it? Also consider the fine texture of leaves and twigs, the slow rise and fall of the cicadas, and occasional other bird calls.
The wall of sound I encountered in the Atlantic Forest was a non-issue in a more recent work – Wolf Soundscapes. The sanctuary in Mafra, Portugal, where I recorded this album was made up of hills with tree corridors, forest, and rocky open spaces. And I can’t overemphasize the stars of the show: Iberian wolves howling together. They would sound fantastic in any space, but the way their calls traveled through this particular geography enhanced the listening experience.
However, this seemingly beautiful scenario surely offered its difficulties as I tried to make recordings and get the best out of this marvel. The wind simply changing direction could bring new issues, or relief; even from some kilometers’ distance, surrounding villages and roads could pollute my idea of a perfect recording. One thing I ‘discovered’, though, was how strange it sounds to listen to two different tonalities coming from what each microphone was capturing. I’ll explain:
I was using the ORTF stereo recording technique (my favorite). In this technique, the two microphones are positioned non-coincidentally, though not too wide apart – making the differences between the left and right channels’ background sounds obvious. Imagine that far off on your right side is a loud stream, and on your left, a waterfall. Even though both are more or less a mash-up of frequencies, similar to white noise, they are still distinguishable from one another. But, even though my goal was to record the animals within the 44 acres (18 hectares) of the sanctuary, my brain was extremely confused by this. Was this because of my background as a sound designer, perfectionism, or the way I perceive and process sounds?
Left channelRight channel
This led me to tweak, turn, and adjust the height of the microphone stand, and try all possible angles for the array – adjusting it for the different heights of the valley, as well as searching the landscape for walls, trees, stones, or openings that could either block the undesirable sounds… or make the gear more susceptible to them. Was this a magic bullet? Absolutely not – this problem was mainly beyond my control! But it helped a bit. When necessary, more mitigation could be done in post-production. And yes, that meant long (long!) periods listening to kkksssshhhhhh sounds and playing with equalization until the recording sounded less confusing, but without spoiling the tonality of the main sound source.
So even though I had it logistically very easy – staying in a house in the sanctuary, where I could check my recordings every day in comfort – I learned so much from this project; it remains the most difficult one that I’ve worked on, in terms of the specifics of attaining what I consider to be high quality recordings. I’m also aware that, if this project had happened years earlier, I wouldn’t have noticed this issue; I guess the more you practice, the more you question.
If I just place high quality gear in a natural space, won’t I automatically get a good recording?
If you have good conditions, then, yes, probably. Maybe, if your gear is set up well in an ideal location, all you need to do is press ‘rec’. However, I believe that there is a difference between that and an approach that is specific to you.
There are nearly a dozen sound artist field recordists whose work I can listen to with my eyes closed and recognize, as with any other form of art, on the basis of a distinctive aesthetic approach. By tuning in to what you most appreciate in a soundscape and letting that guide you in your practice, in time you may be able to develop your own signature.
A couple of weeks ago, I watched The Singing Planet, a documentary film by Liz McKenzie about the voices of the natural world. This is a highly simplified summary that doesn’t make it justice at all. I had the pleasure to review and write an article about it on earth.fm, which I am a curator of. I invite you to read the full article here and, most importantly, watch this beautiful portrait through the ears and eyes of Liz, Richard Nelson (cultural anthropologist and nature field recordist) and Hank Lenfter (writer and nature field recordist).
We started speaking about the world, about the mountain, about the weather, but we are no longer speaking so easily to the world and hearing the world speaking back to us.
David Abram
The Singing Planet is a documentary film the title of which is evocative enough to open doors of (re)discovery onto a world of sounds. Despite recently becoming bored with cinema, I gladly watched director Liz McKenzie’s beautiful film three times over. It’s deeply moving in a nurturing way, and evokes hope for action through the beauty it shows and its deep respect for all living things.
It follows nature-sound recordists and authors Richard Nelson and Hank Lentfer “for an unforgettable immersion in these wild voices and the places that give rise to them”.
Upon the kind invitation from David Woje to be a guest in his podcast Ambisonic Spaces, I took myself to think deeply – or rather to organize my thoughts – about how my personal practice has mutated throughout these years. As I changed, evolved, or moved as a person, so has my practice.
It is a personal journey, with political implications, not necessarily going against what I have done before but there has been a shift. As David says in the episode, it became a lifestyle; it became somewhat an extension of myself. For me this is of incredible importance and very meaningful. For years, while I was studying and after graduating, I felt like I had to split myself between what I desired and the shitty jobs at the mall; later on, the shitty jobs in the audio industry. That’s just life! But personally I always had issues detaching my aspirations, my struggles and everything from the money making big machine I had to deal with to survive.
Field recording allowed me a wide space of contemplation and a portal into the world and all the beings in it. Therefore I cannot ignore the implications of sharing my works with the world. A nature sound recording can be beautiful but empty. These are some questions I have considered to hold in my practice:
Is this about me or about the place and its beings – human and more-than-human?
Am I contributing positively to the place?
Am I de-politicizing and contributing to the erasure and / or diminishing the importance of the stories of this place?
What story is there to tell? Is it up to me to share it?
Can I amplify the voices of the beings that inhabit the place?
Is it possible to immerse myself in the world views of the place and expand my horizons?
Below is the the text I have written to produce the story you can hear in the podcast. It contains links to all the references, people and works spoken of. And I’d love you to join the discussion.
If you’d like to support my work, you can contribute by purchasing my work on bandcamp or offering me a coffee, or 2, on Ko-Fi.
What made me start with field recording was curiosity and novelty. Not because what was around me was changing but because, I suppose, there was some fascination by the act of listening through the equipment. I didn’t understand it at the time but now I have of course realized that field recording is one of the very few things that I am able to do that for once leaves me not restless – I can actually be still, both in my body and my mind. And this is not a usual thing in my daily life. Also this activity came with a sense of appreciation and a growing love for Nature, which is a term that I would rather not think of a separate from myself – I rather use ‘more-than-human-life’, a term that I recently learnt from Kim V. Goldsmith, who is san interdisciplinary artist, creative producer and field recordist in Australia.
I had a relatively big project happening in the end of 2016 and early 2017 in Brazil. It was very touching. I visited the Atlantic Forest, which nowadays is incredibly fragmented. Initially I visited in São Paulo where I did several days of recordings in a State Park called Cantareira. I had a lot of support from the staff, people I won’t forget. And after that I spent around 3 weeks in Minas Gerais in a NGO called Iracambi. This was the first time I worked in a place that contained a culture and an environment that were not really mine, even though the little barriers of language, even though I am the daughter of a Brazilian person, I was still a foreigner and the first time I heard the sounds of this Forest I really felt like I was in another planet. The impression was very strong: the heat, the humidity, the sounds. The feeling of “tropical forest” was very clear. It was here that I started to really think about anthropogenic noise: the park in São Paulo was located not far from the airport and there was a lot of construction around, there were neighbourhoods encroaching the perimeters of this park and I felt that was almost like a violation of the sonic space. I remember hearing the howler monkeys vocalising and this sound was almost completely blended with the sound of planes. In one hand I was very frustrated because the recording that I was trying to make was not good… but nowadays I try to remove my ego from this because this is not directly about my survival, but it was about them. So I don’t see any reason why noise pollution shouldn’t be considered as prejudicial as throwing any kind of trash or dumping foreigner or toxic substances in a place. Fast forward to 2020 I remember very well in the Wolf Sanctuary in Portugal, there was one road within the space of the forest that constituted the sanctuary that was public. And it was very popular – and probably still is – to race with motorbikes, specially in the weekends. In these days the wolfs would not howl or howl much later than usual, so it was very obvious that there has been a change in their behaviour. Why not forbid these activities in such spaces?
Curiosity continued to move me. In Brazil, in the Sanctuary, in Sweden and in other places, in the morning I went picking up the equipment that recorded during the night and I was feeling extremely excited and curious to hear what happened during the night. This was exhilarating. I continued to have this practice of unattended recordings also where I live, a very quiet and beautiful place in the countryside. However, because now I live in this situation where nature is all around me and I have the opportunity to incorporate it into my daily life, and the fact that it’s also quite a safe place; and I don’t even talk about potentially dangerous animals but there isn’t even any people I can be worried about. I was very scared of the wild boars – this a story I have told in some podcasts – that ended up disappearing with a lot of contemplation, with a lot of thinking and confrontation as well. And with this I started to come to an understanding that probably the biggest reason why I was doing unattended recordings at night was out of fear. Not that I consider myself a fearful person but it has taken me some years to actually feel at ease in these environments, outside the walls of my house. At the same time it started to bother why me that it is part of this – because ultimately I believe that there is no separation – because I do field recording very much on the art of appreciating, I have started to feel no other than a coward when I didn’t attended the recordings. Of course I want to do a parenthesis here: if we are talking about research or sometimes imposed conditions in which the only way to record is to use a drop rig – I am not against it at all, but otherwise I will actually make my best to not do it any more. The last time that this happened was still this summer: I recorded the Iberian Red Deer rutting here in the south of Portugal. Even though I didn’t have total logistic control of the situation I still think it’s a fabulous phenomenon to be able to listen to it, but I maybe expect to be the last time I record like this. Because it’s about the experience in nature and to bring my equipment into that as a way of creating a memory, of expressing, even some kind of homage to the place and to the nature symphony and beauty.
What is interesting to me personally in field recording is that – perhaps ironically – taught me to listen with my own ears and it has in a more or less gentle way forced me to be completely comfortable outside, sitting on the ground, not being in an alert mode, not having to look over my shoulder. And this has been quite an important mark in my life, not only as a field recordist but also has a person that walks in this Earth. Earlier this Summer many times I took my equipment in a specific place near my home that is also very close to my heart and sometimes I ended up not recording – I didn’t want to. I started to think about the urge that so many of us have to take pictures, to tape, to record sound even in a way that is so impulsive that seems to come before appreciating. This act started to feel so intrusive to the space and to the experience of just being, which is mostly what I am looking for nowadays. So, in a philosophical way, if you will, my approach and what I have been looking for have been changing significantly in this last handful of years. I haven’t been able to publish any field recording work recently because I want to do it in a way that honours the space and life that has been recorded and for me this is not a very easy thing to accomplish.
This year, I have been involved in a very well rounded project with a team and great logistics which led me to think that I would do a very structured work and bring home fantastic recordings. But in this space I didn’t feel accepted, I always felt very uncomfortable. This can be highly subjective and even sound pathetic but honestly most recordings were… quite bad. Not so much from a technical point of view but there was not any quality to it or the sound pollution was shockingly huge. And for me, someone who has a body that is part of this planet, I start to think that to listen to ourselves – and to the place – it’s very important to be in sort of a communion with more-than-human-life. … without wanting to sound on the basis of pop spirituality – which I vehemently reject…- the lectures and writings of geographer and sound artist AM Kanngieser have been very elucidate in this aspect. And in these particular situations it’s not easy to separate intellect from instinct but I also question if it’s worth to try to do it, in a circumstance like that.
So lost as I was in the beginning of the summer, saving my equipment on the side for a long time, I can say that things have maybe revived very recently when I travelled to Orléans in France together with another field recordist, Jocelyn Robert, and for almost everyday in a week, we went to the forest at night to listen, to experience, to learn, to record… and it was so dark that the most that we could see was the contour of the trees’ canopy against the starry sky. And as our ears were getting habituated to learn the space that we were aiming to record the red deer in the rutting season, the act of sharing the experience directly as it happened was quite transformative, so here I am – or here we are – sharing a part of those recordings. Each of us had their own gear and we placed it independently without interfering in each other’s work, just naturally commenting out of intellectual curiosity, and this has been one of the most, if not the most significant experience of field recording I have had. It has really brought me something new… despite my initial reservations because I always viewed field recording too as an excuse for solitude, since I love to spend time with myself and never managed to work collectively in a context like that.
So this is where I am as field recordist today… I do have some interest in releasing this work, especially because there are some windows to explore regarding mythology of the deer and I consider beautiful the way the space is revealed through the powerful calls of this animal. I have intentions to dive very deep in these recordings so I am not in a hurry either.
Personally I am not a believer in the term conservation: I would rather that the language and the acts themselves would change to ‘protection or action’. Conservation to me reminds me of putting things in a museum – when it’s already too late to do something or when there are imperial interests to it. And even though we feel doom impending in the current climatic and political context, only taking register without providing context, without providing any personal human experience or anything that brings actual value of the place, the life and the human community that inhabits the area, it feels to me like a straight utilitarian approach to nature, which is also the opposite message I believe we all want to tell. There is an eagerness to explore very far from our homes, it’s probably a call for the foreigner, for what is new and I quote for the ‘exotic’, but I find many of this approaches extremely problematic and I’d love that the conversations with field recordists would center around the impact, the communities in which we go, how we feel as a person when we go to these places. I think there is obviously a place for all aspects of travelling far and discovering but we need to consider ways to totally remove imperialist practices and I hope field recording doesn’t fall into this abyss. This is my personal wish – that all of this can be done under the most ethical premises and that the act of sharing sounds that you record can trigger a response in the listeners. A response to be informed, first and foremost and then to be able to do something and if you are someone that worries about the Amazon rainforest or the forests in Indonesia and feel you can’t do anything directly about it, then perhaps start with all around us: our neighbours, our gardens and make better choices within our own capacity. And what is most important after all – to listen or to record?
Melissa Pons 