Field recordings and found sounds

John

I'm a big fan of field recordings both used as just a document of a place (like Chris Watson) or as part of music (Godspeed, Neubauten). However, my knowledge of the area is quite slim, anyone know any good field recording albums/artists?

cornbb

There are the classic Musique Concrete practitioners, such as Schaeffer, Varese, and dem lot. But thats all a bit academic. There are tons of musicians who use found sounds for ambience, or at the start/end of tracks. I'm not sure of many musicians who would use found sounds as their main source of musical material. You could check out Scanner, amongst other music he's used electronic phone/radio scanners to obtain 'found' conversations: http://www.scannerdot.com/

John

I know Scanner already, forgot all about him! I wish he was still doing that phone stuff from time to time. I really enjoyed that.

I like musique concrete but I only really know the odd piece, do you know of any good albums/compilations worth checking out? I have the four Anthologies of Noise and Electronic Music on Sub Rosa if you're familiar with them (if you're not, get them).

cornbb

I'm afraid I don't, I just studied a few of the 'classic' pieces in college. I might check out those anthologies though, they sound pretty cool...

DadaKopf

'Field Recordings from Mali', and any field recordings of Gamelan music, and, eh, real American folk music.

Incredibly weird and wonderful.

Ghost Rider

If you're interested in field recordings of ethnic music, "The Secret Museum of Mankind" was a real ear-opener for me. It's a series of re-mastered CDs based on 78s. The range of music and the performances are stunning.

This stuff is about as far from "experimental music" as most definitions would allow, but there's such a richness of musical textures and atmospheres in these compilations that I find it hard to imagine how anyone interested in what music can be (as opposed to what it generally is) could fail to be bowled over.

John

Cheers Dadakopf and Ghost Rider, I'll check those out.

Scratch Acid

'Quantum' by Basil Kirchin is pretty interesting. It's field recordings mixed with jazz and recordings of mentally handicapped children.

'Highly Bred and Sweetly Tempered' by Climax Golden Twins is pretty nice. It's found sounds and shtuff like that with some guitar-y bits.

'The Conet Project' is pretty kerazzy. It's recordings of broadcasts from numbers stations, (Read all about it!: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_stations). They're generally pretty damn eerie, and a lot of fun to listen to.

Beh!

Edit: Forgot to mention, the label that released the Conet Project on CD has the whole thing hosted on their site for free download. http://irdial.hyperreal.org/

Ghost Rider

The work of Philip Jeck is also well worth checking out. Using found sound sources, particularly 78 records, Jeck creates loops (sometimes digitally using sampling devices, sometimes "manually" i.e. by dabbing spots of glue onto the surface of vinyl records in order to make the needle hop). The results are crackly, spooky soundscapes which are always evocative and often lyrical or melancholic.

His best known piece is "Vinyl Requiem", a performance piece played on 180 Dansette turntables, among other things! I highly recommend the CD entitled "Stoke", which is on the Touch label.

Here's Jeck's official website:

http://www.philipjeck.com/

Acerferrari3200

Composed by Gavin Bryars with Tom Waits .

Locust Reign

The band Sabres on Neurot Recordings are pretty cool, worth checking out
http://www.neurotrecordings.com/artists/sabers/index.aspx
Theres an mp3 on the site too.

DadaKopf

Ghost Rider wrote:

The work of Philip Jeck is also well worth checking out. Using found sound sources, particularly 78 records, Jeck creates loops (sometimes digitally using sampling devices, sometimes "manually" i.e. by dabbing spots of glue onto the surface of vinyl records in order to make the needle hop). The results are crackly, spooky soundscapes which are always evocative and often lyrical or melancholic.

His best known piece is "Vinyl Requiem", a performance piece played on 180 Dansette turntables, among other things! I highly recommend the CD entitled "Stoke", which is on the Touch label.

Here's Jeck's official website:

http://www.philipjeck.com/

Ahhh, Philip Jeck. Saw him twice at the second Mór festival a few years ago. Most people didn't dig him, but I really liked his set. Just lying on the floor, letting it all wash over me. Nice.

mike65

This is mainstream but have you checked out Ummagumma song Grantchester Meadows by Pink Floyd which has the listener shooing away flies! Theres a lovely moment with a swan on a lake wings splashing over the surface.

Mike.

Ghost Rider

Haven't heard it but I've been Grantchester, and it is pretty lovely.

mike65 wrote:

This is mainstream but have you checked out Ummagumma song Grantchester Meadows by Pink Floyd which has the listener shooing away flies! Theres a lovely moment with a swan on a lake wings splashing over the surface.

Mike.

ZWEI_VIER_ZWEI

As a sort of aside...if one were interested in making this kind of stuff where would you get the kind of recording kit...I assume a regular microphone would do a mediocre task, and whenever you see people doing on this on tv they always seem to hve these weird almost conical microphones...

cornbb

ZWEI_VIER_ZWEI wrote:

As a sort of aside...if one were interested in making this kind of stuff where would you get the kind of recording kit...I assume a regular microphone would do a mediocre task, and whenever you see people doing on this on tv they always seem to hve these weird almost conical microphones...

You mean something like this?
http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/images/oreilly/digitalmedia/2005/01/serafine_0105_field_600.jpg

I have no idea what that thing is!

A lot of outdoors work involves using a shotgun mic. That's one of those big hairy phallic yokes you see news reporters talking into and at the edges of soccer pitches - these are hypercardioid (i.e. very directional) in order to cut down on unwanted environmental noise.

That wouldn't be strictly necessary though - a cheaper/more conventional mic could do the trick with a foam windshield. As for the recording itself though, one could use something like a specialist hard-disk or DAT recorder, or something cheap and portable like a minidisc recorder.

Ghost Rider

DAT is the movie industry standard for recording on-location sound. Minidisc recording, while cheaper, involves data compression of a sort that many professionals would find unacceptable. (Also, I've never come across a Minidisc player that wasn't incredibly annoying to operate.)

A hard disk recorder would be good too, as long as the sampling and the bit rate are high, and the device doesn't have any noisy components such as a fan (which is a real problem with most PCs/laptops).

cornbb wrote:

You mean something like this?
http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/images/oreilly/digitalmedia/2005/01/serafine_0105_field_600.jpg

I have no idea what that thing is!

A lot of outdoors work involves using a shotgun mic. That's one of those big hairy phallic yokes you see news reporters talking into and at the edges of soccer pitches - these are hypercardioid (i.e. very directional) in order to cut down on unwanted environmental noise.

That wouldn't be strictly necessary though - a cheaper/more conventional mic could do the trick with a foam windshield. As for the recording itself though, one could use something like a specialist hard-disk or DAT recorder, or something cheap and portable like a minidisc recorder.

david

Unless the goal of field recording is to pick up conversations/animal noises etc then i'd say a nice omni would do better than a rifle mic

PsychForm

Some more experimental projects that use field recordings and found sounds....specificly... are Monos, Ora, Darren Tate, Paul Bradley, Collin Potter, Nobuo Yamada and Joe Colley. These projects are more likey to use the field or found sounds to create the composition....not just use them in a composition. This realm of experimental music crosses over heavily into the "drone" catagory as well.

Psych

PsychForm Records
Eclectic Listening

John

Old thread, arise from the gloom of the past!

Just thought I'd bump this up to highly, highly recommend Storm by Chris Watson and BJ Nilsen. I got this last week and it is absolutely beautiful, collages of hours and hours of stormy weather in remote places. I was listening to it in bed and it really made me pull the duvet tight against the freezing wind until I remembered that it was just audio, hehe.

Also, that Conet Project number stations thing that Scratch Acid mentioned is available for free download from the label's site. Clicky here. It's creepy but addictive. Very spooky stuff.

tonyhiggins

I did it for my masters in music tech thesis. I recorded all the percussive sounds I could on a route from my home to where I used to play a jazz gig every monday night. The idea I had was that it wasn't only found sounds, it was a found melody - the sequence of the notes I obtained from hitting lampposts (pretty musical!) were in the order I found them on the route. I mixed it with recordings of myself playing drums and a live drum performance also. Just to chuck in another one, I listen to a load of OCORA cds while writing it for African drumming stuff


www.junior85.ie/illbethereintenminutes

Executive Steve

www.weareie.com

- one of the better irish blogs dealing with experimental electronica and related fields of music [from a music junkies and a dj's perspective]...

it's run by naphta, droid and slug, the latter two of which performed at the opening of the Beckett festival at the national gallery... there's a full mp3 archive of their set that night which involved asplicing together ambient / drone / electronica / beckett interviews and plays / as well as several omni directional microphones dispersed around the area where all the audience were standing around [presumably chatting about beckett related stuff] and being picked up and broadcast back into the room...

it's a pretty interesting document of what you can do with the sort of sounds you find in a social context when you're "lubricating" the social context with music and feeding the sounds you find [together with sounds you brought along with you for that purpose!]

droid said it was the only gig he ever did where instead of sweaty ravers shaking his hand afterwards he was congratulated by the cultural attaché of the french embassy afterwards

Sham Squire

Google a guy called Secret Mommy and check out his latest album. Very funky stuff using only recordings he made at an aerobics class. You'll get more accurate info by google, i'm only remembering a recent interview and heard the music on a free cd with the Wire magazine.
Also check out my friend tigali who regularly sticks his mics out the window and puts it in his tracks.
www.myspace.com/tigali

Red Soup

Back to making field recordings...

Could anyone recommend a good, cheap digital recorder for field recordings, prefably with a decent built in mic? I've looked them up a bit but can only find ones for €400+. I dunno if I'd be bothered paying out that much.

I'm hoping to do some recordings while travelling in central africa, so it'd have to be fairly tough too..
thanks.

Samos

You should check out "The Books", who do a great job of implementing "found sounds" into their music. In particular, listen to their album Thought for Food, which has a really inventive use of random sound clips in addition to their playing of guitar and violin/cello. As it happens, I think they're playing in the Sugarclub on Thursday 17th, but I won't be able to go unfortunately.

I suppose it would do no harm to investigate some early Brian Eno recordings too!