Field Recordings

“I recorded this in the ‘Secret Garden’, which is my name for the private space belonging to a neighbour, and which by sheer chance I was offered access to a few months ago. It’s a beautiful place with sculptures, tall trees and a majestic fountain. Since being dogged by an illness, I can’t get very far, so the downstairs garden has been a place to dream in, belong to, and feel the sun on my face.

In the hot summer gone, this sound was pure magic, an absolute balm while London sweltered and panted. During the unrelenting heatwaves, the birds would go crazy with delight – some mornings it was like Piccadilly Circus with every feathered creature diving in for a drink or to splash around.

I hear the fountain from my upstairs window and it is the soundtrack to everything. It runs 24 hours a day, and whether listening to the radio, reading a book, resting, waking up at 3am…it is the sound of life continuing always. Illness can feel like desert time – the long days, the uncertainty. I’m reminded so much of Emily Dickinson’s lines – the fountain has its own music and ‘sings the tune without the words,/And never stops at all.’”

“This is a phone recording of an improvised choir at the protest camp for housing in València city centre. People are singing in Valencian, “ningú sense casa, ni cases sense gent” – no one without a home, and no homes without people.

Protests have spread across Spain after the eviction of 87-year old María del Carmen Abascal “Maricarmen” in Madrid. There’s now dozens of tents occupying the main square in València, where activists organise different talks and events.”

“The wind came in waves rattling the treetops, the sound was complimented by the birds and a few squirrels running around above me.”

“I recorded this in the Ionian Sea, holding a hydrophone just above the rocks where the tide was moving. What comes through is a whole submerged conversation – clicks and crackles, pops and snaps, layered under the slower rhythm of water against stone. Some of those sounds are fish, and barnacles, but most of that crackling is likely snapping shrimp: tiny crustaceans with one oversized claw that snaps shut so fast it forms a bubble in the water, which then collapses and makes the sound. Rachel Carson wrote about this exact phenomenon in The Edge of the Sea, describing it as a “continuous sizzling, crackling sound”, and how the old idea of the sea as a silent place is entirely false. I think about that a lot, and in this audio we can hear the sounds of the living sea. So much is always being said beneath the surface, in frequencies we’ve spent centuries assuming weren’t there. I record the sea because I want to keep listening for what it’s actually saying, rather than what I’ve been taught to expect from silence.”

“Since early August, through this summer’s multiple heatwaves, this park has had a thick carpet of dead leaves. Right now you can see the beginnings of a false autumn as full green branches stand side by side with skeletal bare trees, the fallen leaves slowly taken away by the council in large transparent bags.”