Cicadas may be all the rage this year due to the 17-year brood emerging in North America. However, this recording of an annual brood of cicadas (ჭრიჭინობელა) in Tbilisi also creates a dense sonic atmosphere from their treetop feeding zone, here recorded on a hot July afternoon in a forest at Lake Lisi (ლისის ტბა).

A richly carved portico, surmounted by a startling owl, frames an entryway leading inward. The tap of your shoes on the hard floor resonates, lending your footsteps a surprising importance. A series of electric bulbs, some burnt out or missing, throws your shadow in evolving patterns, fractured and scintillating, a dark glissando passing along the half-columns that line the walls.

In this unmanipulated recording, a performance of the bells of the Transfiguration Cathedral Spaso-Efimeyev Monastery in Suzdaľ, one of the towns on the best-known tourist route in Russia, called the „Golden Ring“, takes place.

I have chosen the 7th-century Armenian cathedral of

Aruchavank to represent

the many churches in Armenia in which I made recordings. An

earthquake, centuries ago, has left its sturdy walls standing beneath

a gaping oculus where the now-missing tholobate and conical dome

should be.

As we enter and look up, we find ourselves as if standing at

the bottom of a well, lowly beings, our only consolation to peer

upwards into a mysterious blue beyond, a wintry world peopled by a

roaring wind and soaring birds.

Part of Central Asia PhoNographic

Mornings,

in the series „Each Morning of the World“.

A long street stretches out before you, foreshortened and dissolving as it thrusts into the sharp glint of a low sun. A scatter of nervous sparrows explodes as you approach; then a passing car parts the air, leaving its traces in the whispering turbulence. A distant clocktower strikes the quarter-hour. And then — [the page is partly burnt; the rest is lost].

In the Czech lands, the name for November is listopad, referring literally to the falling („pad“) of leaves („listy“). Our own common word for this time of year, fall, puts focus on the same annual phenomenon. This composition uses the riffling of the ‘leaves’ of an old book (playing on a common English colocution), together with additional sources.

We come to a cattle market alongside the road as we are leaving Artashat, an Armenian regional administrative capital. Sheep, cows, dogs and men standing in the grass and the gravel, making deals. We strike up a conversation with one of the men and, as commonly happens in the Caucasus, we are invited for a visit. Part of World Listening Day 2020.

A dawn recording of birds and rain from my window overlooking a wooded park. The park is home to many doves, jays, magpies and numerous kinds of little birds I don’t know the names of. It forms my contribution to the compilation Pass it on ~ Early Morning Soundscapes ⨀.