The Best Field Recordings of 2024 | Bandcamp Daily
"The goal of the Best Field Recordings column is to gather the best sounds recorded outside the studio from all around the world. In 2024, we highlighted over 100 recordings from some of the most remote regions on Earth and the busiest thoroughfares of the biggest cities. It was particularly difficult to choose the following list to represent the best of the year’s releases, but hopefully it demonstrates the variety and quality of field recordings to be found on Bandcamp—from Beijing to Berlin, from the frozen mountains of Norway to the tropical rainforests of Thailand, including birds and frogs and seals and, of course, people." – Matthew Blackwell
MB: "Luc Ferrari was one of the inventors of field recording as we know it. As co-founder of the important French research studio GRM, his work was key to the development of musique concrète, but he went a step further with his piece Presque Rien No. 1 (1967–70). He wrote of that work, a collection of sounds from a Croatian fishing village, that “Following the total disappearance of abstract sounds, this piece could be considered a sonic photographic slide.” But alongside Luc was his wife and working partner, Brunhild, who collaborated with him for over four decades. Beginning in 2010, Brunhild began releasing her own important solo work. Extérieur-jour’s title track is cinéma pour l’oreille, cinema for the ear, and allows the listener to imagine their own film that it might soundtrack (the only hint we get is from the title: “Exterior, day”). The second song, “Le Piano Englouti” or “The Sunken Piano,” is an elegiac piece recorded across 15 years and all around the world from Japan to the Aegean Sea; its theme of nostalgia and loss is figured in the titular piano which dips and rises like a fleeting memory. These pieces are crucial additions to Brunhild’s growing discography and further evidence that she deserves a larger place in the history of modern music."
A comfy chair and a pair of nice headphones make for an especially nice listening experience.
MB: "“A soundwalk is any excursion whose main purpose is listening to the environment,” wrote Hildegard Westerkamp in 1974. “It is exposing our ears to every sound around us no matter where we are.” This year featured many outstanding soundwalks, including Andrew Weathers walking to the French Broad River in North Carolina and Craig Shepard walking through Aubervilliers, France. Viv Corringham has been performing soundwalks for more than two decades now, beginning with her “Shadow-walks” series in which she walks with someone on a route that has been important in their lives. Her project for Soundwalkscapes was to take a soundwalk on the first Monday of every month in 2023, no matter where she was. She sings, hums, and reads signs along the way: “Nearly 200 years ago, Central Park’s landscape near the west 85th street entrance was home to Seneca Village, a community of predominantly free African American property owners,” she says, or: “Notice: 24-hour video surveillance,” or: “Warning: elevated bacterial levels have been recorded in stormwater runoff.” Westerkamp said that wherever we go on a soundwalk, “we will give our ears priority. They have been neglected by us for a long time.” Come along with Corringham and neglect your ears no longer; with Soundwalkscapes, she reveals anew the depth of sound all around us."
MB: "In 1988, after a stay of seven months, Sid Frank took a camcorder around the city of Beijing to record the streets that he had grown to know and love. He meant to keep the VHS tape as nothing more than a memento. He certainly didn’t intend to create music with it. Fast-forward 25 years and Frank had taken up composing after downloading a synth app on his iPad. He played his first gig in 2014 at the age of 59. Later still, in 2023, he decided to record a soundtrack for his old Beijing tape. The track “Beijing 1988” overlays the original footage with gliding synths, the sounds of the Chinese city of more than three decades ago surfacing like phantoms through the haze. The rest of the album consists of these field recordings left untreated like an accidental time capsule. As a piece of art, Beijing 1988 is all the more affecting because it couldn’t have been planned; the people captured on tape survived the vagaries of time to speak to us, candidly and uncannily, from the past to the present."
MB: "Felix Hess was a man of many talents: scientist, inventor, artist, collector. His interest in the physics of boomerangs led him to Australia, where he was amazed at the sounds of bullfrogs at night. He recorded them for a series of highly collectable cassettes, Frogs 1-5, in the 1980s and ‘90s. Hess’s interest in frog calls guided him into other pursuits as well: He created small mechanical noise-making devices that would respond to another according to the same amphibian logic. These were shown in museums around the world, which led him to collect zenga, Zen Buddhist paintings. (One such painting of a frog serves as the album art here.) What fascinated Hess was the complex, overlapping patterns that the frogs created, sometimes leading to a phasing effect that can cause one’s head to spin. It’s a phenomenon that is much in evidence across Frogs, a Selection of Field Recordings, which gathers some of the best examples from the Frogs series. These are pure, unedited field recordings, but at times they outdo even the most psychedelic avant-garde music."
MB: "Spiritus Contra Spiritum narrates a journey into recovery from the depths of addiction. Peter Wolfgang recorded crucial moments along his path to sobriety from alcohol, from the gruelingly mundane to the peacefully calm. John Atkinson then isolated tonal structures from those recordings as the basis for piano and saxophone compositions. We begin with frustration on “Addictum,” with the robotic voice of an insurance company telephone tree. Then follows an AA meeting in which participants describe their struggles on “Angustia”: “When it comes to wanting help—we all want help, but when you’re an addict you feel that people judge you,” says a young woman. But as the album progresses, so too does Wolfgang’s mental state. By the final track, “Pacem,” the clatter and din of the early tracks fades away into running water and bright, major chords. The final sound on the album is a male voice: “I think I just need to give myself permission to be myself, to be enough.” Where most field recording albums look outward to the exterior world, Spiritus Contra Spiritum looks inward to devastating but cathartic effect."
Incredibly heavy project, beautifully and tastefully done. Deserving of a much larger audience than it will get. Really powerful evidence of what sound can express beyond "music."
MB: "Though his work centers around field recording, the Kenyan artist Joseph Kamaru has always had the heart of a composer. His breakthrough album, 2020’s Peel, combined environmental sound with emotive electronic pieces, while last year’s Dissolution Grip re-synthesized waveforms taken from field recordings so that the originals haunted the album like memories. Natur, though, is pure field recording, though you might not know it by listening. Waves of electricity buzz and vibrate, building to crescendos and then crashing down again into staticky ambience. These sounds were gathered with electromagnetic microphones from the streets of Berlin. In KMRU’s native Nairobi, power lines and transformers buzz in the streets and mingle with conversation, birds, and insects. Upon moving to Germany, he noticed how Berlin buried its power grid, banished its wildlife, and cloistered its population into apartment blocks. Natur summons these constituent parts back into the open, making technology’s confrontation with nature explicit. Though the album’s overpowering electrical hum suggests tech may be dominant, a closer listen reveals that wildlife is always at the margins, making itself heard through the noise."
It's a nice record like all of the rest of the KMRU albums I've heard but it still doesn't really hit the right spot for me. Something about his production style just doesn't connect with me. It's probably my favorite that I've heard from him, though!
MB: "In terms of sheer breadth, the Harkening Critters compilation from forms of minutiae is hard to beat. Across its four hours, it features 32 field recordists from around the world recording the sounds of life from yeast to howler monkeys. Nearly every approach conceivable is represented: sometimes clear, unedited recordings are left untouched; sometimes they are stitched together from different sessions; sometimes instrumentation is added. At times the scale is tiny, as with the ants who infiltrated Stéphane Marin’s recorder. At others, it is almost unfathomably large, as with the drifting ice fields off the coast of Hokkaido which, Yoichi Kamimura notes, have been abandoned by ribbon seals in recent years due to global warming. Despite the differences in subject matter and method, this theme of humans’ interaction with wildlife runs throughout Harkening Critters. The album is a welcome introduction to the world of field recording for highlighting the discipline’s key figures and for illustrating the stakes of their work: nothing less than documenting life on Earth."
MB: "The Polish field recordist Izabela Dłużyk was born blind yet she can identify birds with incredible accuracy. When she was young, her aunt lent her an encyclopedia with a CD-ROM of birdsong. She memorized the calls and soon began recording wildlife herself in the ancient Białowieza forest. “We as humans are more focused on visual aspects. When we look at birding, it is mostly about photography—for instance, identifying birds by sight and not by sound,” Dłużyk told the BBC. “Listening makes us more aware.” Her first two albums were recorded in the Polish forest, but she traveled to the Peruvian Amazon for The Amazon—where the moon wept. The album takes us through a day and night in the rainforest, from “Before dawn” to “Melody in the midday heat” to “The great nocturne.” We encounter parrots, toucans, frogs, and squirrel monkeys, all narrated in the liner notes as if she were our expert tour guide. The massive two-disc set ends with a beautiful recording of a November rainstorm. With this final track, Dłużyk leaves us on a poetic note: “Let’s listen attentively, and perhaps, if we set aside what we can only grasp with our reason and knowledge, we may hear as the rainforest retells us the ancient legend about its birth, about the moon and its impossible love,” she writes. “The legend of the Amazon, a place where the moon wept.”"
MB: "The Danish field recordist Jacob Kirkegaard has made a career exploring the darkest elements of the human experience: waste, war, destruction, and death. His project Through the Wall explored the effects of apartheid via the Israeli West Bank Barrier; in that case, he discovered that the wall itself remained mute even as sounds traveled from one side to the other. But for Membrane, which took the border wall between the U.S. and Mexico as its subject, he found that the fence itself produced as much noise as its environment. “When I placed my sensors on the fence, I could hear how the sounds of the surroundings were making it resonate and generate tones, almost as if it were a harp,” he says. Kirkegaard traveled across 600 miles of the wall with cellist Mariel Roberts, and together they turned the fence into a musical instrument by attaching contact mics to it and recording its resonances. Traverse combines these field recordings with Roberts’s cello, making the fence a partner in a duet. The project proves that however intimidating the wall may look, it is not a permanent fixture of the landscape: it shudders and it creaks and it bends, and with time it will fall."
MB: "The idea of creating instruments from long metal wires isn’t unique to Alan Lamb. Alvin Lucier wrote his Music on a Long Thin Wire in 1977; Ellen Fullman began developing her Long String Instrument in 1980. But the king of all such instruments was the Faraway Wind Organ, a half-mile stretch of abandoned telegraph wires in Western Australia that Lamb converted into an instrument. The wind blowing across the unsheathed wires—six of them strung across twelve poles like a massive guitar—created a surprising variety of sounds that Lamb could supplement with his own manipulations. He would record the environmental effects on the wires for hours at a time and later edit the results into beautifully stark compositions. Night Passage gathers two of these, the title track (1984–85) and “Last Anzac” (1984) along with a piece generated from a separate wind organ in Japan. Ultimately, the Faraway Wind Organ was destroyed by lightning and termites and its unique construction and sound profile were lost. We’re lucky to have this astounding document of the massive instrument sounding out across the Australian landscape."
Very Room40 record. Big, burly, crackly droning. On the colder side. It's fine but not something I'm dying to listen to again.
MB: "Imagine the Arctic and you likely envision vast, snow-covered ranges, pure white and silent. Angus Carlyle knows that’s not the case. On Powerlines, he documents what he calls the “electro-magnetic north” by recording the power lines strung outside of Tromsø, Norway with electromagnetic microphones. To do so, he has to battle the elements (“I am completely unprepared for the sleet, hail, slush and gusting winds: the sheer wetness of things,” he writes). This is a single, hour-long track, but it plays out like a record full of incongruous songs: we hear his laborious trek, the electrical hum and buzz of the lines, an interrupting group of Norwegians, and seemingly all the snow, wind, and water in the region. At times it’s difficult to believe that all these sounds exist on the same album, not to mention the same walk—one of the most dynamic and varied soundwalks of this or any year. You’ll never imagine the Arctic in quite the same way again."
MB: "Francisco López has already produced several field recording classics in his Epoché Collection, beginning with 2014’s Hyper-Rainforest and continuing across the world from Peru to Cuba to New Zealand to Burma. But on his latest, Himavanta, he has outdone himself: this is an 11-hour set recorded during the monsoon season in several of Thailand’s rainforests. The Epoché recordings feature what López calls “environmental sound matter,” by which he means the sonic material itself, apart from its representation of a real location. Himavanta is not only a record of wildlife and weather events in Thailand (though it is that, too), but music whose beauty can be understood through “profound listening.” In other words, this is not a documentary of López’s immersion into the rainforest, but a piece of art that you can immerse yourself in. And at this epic scope, it’s easy to get lost among its riches."