#006: Nature Music
by Chris Slade
ex-directory is a new weekly newsletter for artists and the world’s music industry, curated by a group of friends and colleagues in cities across the globe.
This month, we’re going off-grid to find out how artists and audio-makers are finding inspiration in the natural world. Today, we meet creators who are harnessing nature’s sonic power to tell stories, connect online communities and even distill entirely new, otherworldly sounds.
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Outside of her day job as a radio producer, Eleanor McDowell runs Field Recordings, a podcast dedicated to (literally) “standing silently in fields”. Launched just ahead of the UK’s first Covid-19 lockdown in the spring of 2020, the podcast has since played host to hundreds of audio-makers sharing snapshots of their world. Uploads include the ASMR-like clatter of fisherman sorting clams on a Portuguese beach, chirping froglets in New South Wales, waves crashing on the frozen shores of Lake Ontario and a dog dreaming in the Wirral. At the time of writing, there are 246 episodes of Field Recordings and it has received praise from The New Yorker and Financial Times.
“To be very honest, the project started out as a joke,” Eleanor begins via email. In her role at radio production company Falling Tree, she was tasked with creating low cost podcast development ideas. “I suggested we make something with absolutely no editing, where we just go and stand silently recording the sound of a literal field. In 2019, I got my heart badly broken and found myself pretty burnt out with work. Suddenly, I felt an overwhelming desire to go and do this, just to stand still and listen to the birds for a bit. On New Year's Eve 2019, I wrote to some audio makers I knew around the world and asked them if they felt like doing it too.”
Soon, Eleanor’s global network of contributors would become a community in itself. Over the last year, Field Recordings has published audio captured at Black Lives Matter protests in New York, Melbourne’s ‘March 4 Justice’ and the recent action to stop a Home Office deportation on a residential street in Glasgow.
“Hearing these recordings felt more like an act of companionship, like you were getting to stand alongside someone and listen to the things that felt beautiful, peaceful or meaningful to them”, she explains. In one noteworthy upload, UK-based contributor Rosa Eaton shared audio of seagulls squawking outside her open window, along with the caption: “I am vulnerable and have been shielding, so I got a text from the government telling me I could open my windows but not put out my bins. After two months I rigged up a table by an upstairs window so I could lay on the table with my head outside the window and feel like I was outside. It felt incredible.”
Eleanor notes that other listeners have also reached out to credit the pod as a balm for anxiety and insomnia. “I was really touched that it had been used in that way”, she says.
One contributor to Field Recordings is sound engineer Rob Byers, whose “ice lasers” — his name for the sci-fi-esque pew-pews of creaking lake ice in Michigan — recently appeared on the pod. After relocating to northern Michigan for winter, Rob’s interest in field recording gave his days structure. “It was a beautiful, quiet place to be but it was also isolating. There were some great recording locations right out my front door and having field recording was a really wonderful way to get myself out of the house and enjoy the outdoors.” Rob created his recording by submerging a hydrophone into the lake where the overnight drop in temperature causes the ice to “sing”.
Rob’s career, like Eleanor’s, began in radio production. “When I started at NPR,” he says, “I was thrust into this amazing world of experienced audio engineers and storytellers, but what always interested me were the engineers’ stories about recording for days on end in the jungle, climbing a tree to record elephants, creating DIY recording setups. Field recording was this magical, intriguing world I didn‘t quite understand.”
Eventually, he and his colleague Michael Raphael would embark on a life-changing adventure to record migrating sandhill cranes at sunrise. “That trip was my introduction to long-duration nature recordings, and it had a big impact on me,” he recalls. On the mental health benefits of the practice, Rob notes that “natural soundscapes can sometimes relax me just like music can.”
Another project aiming to digitise and catalogue the ambience of the natural world is Sounds of The Forest, an interactive ‘sound map’ developed by the organisers of England’s Timber Festival, an annual 3-day arts and music event in the National Forest. After their 2020 event was postponed due to the pandemic, organisers created the platform as a place where would-be attendees could gather and share one-minute recordings from their local woodland. To date, over 2 million listeners have tuned in.
“We were overwhelmed by the response,” says festival organiser Hayley Ashby over email. “Hundreds of people in more that 70 countries and across 6 continents got in touch to submit their soundscapes.” Touring across the map, you can stumble on the sounds of lemur calls in Madagascar, a battle between two nightingale songs in Slovakia and the slow breathing of a three-toed sloth in Honduras.
“It’s well documented that time spent in nature can help to lower heart rate and improve well-being but even just listening to the sounds of nature, trees and birdsong can have a real impact on health,” Hayley says. “After we launched [the project] we realised just how mindful the process of recording could be, and how it makes you stop and really listen to the harmonies of the natural world. Since the project launched so many people have expressed how transformative the process of recording the sounds and listening to others via the map has been.”
Where field recording aficionados are capturing raw audio from their surroundings, other curious experimentalists like Noah — better known by the username MycoLyco — are using nature to distill new sounds entirely.
Using a process called biodata sonification, Noah connects synthesisers to giant oyster mushrooms and quartz crystals, then records their output. His debut album ‘Initial Research’ (available on Bandcamp) includes tracks like ‘Pink Oysters Play Techno Before Harvest’ and ‘Sunrise Communion: Trying To Talk To Plants’. In the album’s liner notes, he says: “I taught myself electrical engineering and, up until the pandemic, was working for a major modular synthesiser company as a production technician. Without the pandemic it’s likely I would still be working for them and not connecting my synths to mushrooms and crystals.”
Today, Noah’s fan base includes over half a million followers on Tiktok and a loyal YouTube following. His space age compositions range from the gentle ambient bubbling of an amethyst playing a Eurorack to the erratic chatter of oyster mushrooms performing on a modular synth.
“It really just started in my studio where I was growing cordyceps, oyster mushrooms and lion's mane,” he tells me over Instagram DM. “I’ve got more than I know what to do with at this point.” From mushrooms, Noah’s remit soon expanded to exploring further, connecting sensors to forest mandrakes, bonsai trees and all manner of natural organisms. His Bandcamp page states: “2020 has been a year of trial and tribulation for the entire world. I have gone deep inside and retreated, reset and re-calibrated. This is what I have come up with in that time.”
When asked if his work has a singular message, he replied: “Perhaps just that there is more than meets the eye in the world we live in.”
Despite the creators of these projects setting out on vastly different missions, each has come to find the therapeutic, inspirational power in listening to and engaging with the natural world. In each case, the meditational process of creating the work has in turn helped listeners to think deeply, soothe their anxieties and be transported, particularly during a time of isolation.
When asked why she thinks people make field recordings in the first place, Eleanor offers: “It’s like photographing an image. Pointing a microphone towards a sound is a way of holding a moment in time, of paying attention and capturing something of your subjective experience of the world.” Perhaps sharing that subjective experience is all it takes to bring us closer together, even when we’re far apart.
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