The sounds of bird calls, foliage rustling in the wind or water lapping at the edge of a shore are experiences I cherish more than anything. They evoke emotions that I rarely feel at any other time and seem to accompany vivid childhood memories of being outside. I often ponder, if I had to choose between loosing all but one of my senses, which would it be? Of course, when you loose one of your senses you are not usually the one who decides which sense is lost and in many cases, you are instead often born without them, never knowing what it would be like to live with them in the first place. But, having been fortunate enough to be born with all of my senses and to experience them firsthand, if I had the luxury of deciding which singular sense to keep, for me, it would be hearing.
As someone who has yet to discover any inkling of musical talent within myself, I envy musicians. The creation of music has to be the purest form of artistic expression. Through its creation, an artist can guide you through waves of emotion with little more than the simple access to your ears; they can persuade on to you thoughts of happiness, sadness and anger; they can change your mood from one minute to the next. They are able to convey what they feel into sounds, and, often, these sounds are able to convey those feelings back to the listener.
To combine the creative expression of music with the inherent sounds of our surroundings is to take those felt emotions one step further.
With this series of inspirations, titled 'Field Recordings', I hope to share music that I have found which features recordings of nature intertwined with the artists' musical expression.
"Listen to the Flowers Grow" is a remix composed by AES Dana of a track from Subgardens. The track starts out with the sound of birds calling laced with an ethereal synthesizer and incorporates a woman's voice who calmly confesses: "I listen to the flowers grow, it takes time and I like it." From there, the nearly eight-minute track picks up and becomes more layered, incorporating deep beats over airy, reverberating synthesizers, but all the while the bird calls continue to loop in the background - occasionally the music subdues to let the tranquility of the bird call shine through in its entirety. The last minute-and-a-half of the track is almost entirely left to the resplendent field recording.
