A hopeful rewilding
As a lockdown musician I stopped making music entirely at first, feeling demotivated and uninspired. The newly unfolding online musical environment offered little personal comfort and so I lost myself in supporting family, reading, looking and listening while the landscape around me unfurled from its own, centuries-old human lockdown…
Rewindwild
A new festival of contemporary music, literature and performance in the Lake District near where I live was rescheduled this year due to Covid-19. Aerial Festival made the decision to shift their inaugural output online and so put a variety of callouts into the ether for local creators to apply to. It came at the right time for me, all my live work had been cancelled until 2021 and I was starting to learn more about recording and editing for a handful of small remote recording projects. I applied to create a piece of audio that would transport the listener to the Lake District National Park in lieu of visiting this summer, I called it Rewindwild.
In reality, the Lake District has been inundated with UK tourists on ‘staycation’ this summer, but at the time the idea had a strange dystopian poignancy. Myself and my partner were lucky, along with many of the furloughed local community, to be able to have these fells and the shining levels where we live almost entirely to ourselves at the start of the lockdown. Listening became a singular way of passing hours, and I was taking the opportunity to learn more about soundscape ecology, the Deep Listening of Pauline Oliveros and improvisation techniques thanks to some literature steers from friends.
When researchers consider the effects of human-induced noise as a factor in biophonic loss, the results are notable because there is not much attention being paid to how animals or their respective habitats might be affected. From my experience and that of many visitors to the national parks, the introduction of noise into natural soundscape heightens that sense of loss
Bernie Krause, Wild Soundscapes
“Listening, been listening…”
All of these strands came together when I was writing Rewindwild, the music evolved as I collected different kinds of recordings from my surroundings, gathering them like you might group together feathers, nuts and leaves from a woodland forage. The ways I ended up using my instruments, the notated and recorded materials was also new for me, I guess in some way this was a response to the musical-compass-finding the pandemic has forced a lot of professional musicians to do. This is how I described the finished piece in the Aerial programme: Inspired by the pioneering soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause who explores the impacts of soundscapes on ecosystems, Rewindwild is a personal exploration into the sounds revealed by lockdown and how we might listen and respond to ‘noise’ returning to the Lake District. In a hopeful rewilding of instrumental and found sound projected into a future Lake District landscape, I wanted to explore the environmental and ecological benefits of returning swathes of our countryside back to nature.
Sounds
I’ve used field recordings from the woods and fields which I’ve spent these past strange months listening to, piecing together an aural picture of my surroundings. I’ve visited the edges of the Lake District National Park at different times of the day and night to see what sounds were there and changing over time, as well as recording areas of higher population noise and some of the most popular tourist spots during lockdown easing.
Hydrophones and contact mics allowed me to record some of the recognisable watery sounds, a jetty before a rain storm and the log percussion that makes up some of the drum sets in the piece alongside reversed walking noises and the inner sounds of a metal fence in the wind, or when struck and bowed with grasses. What has followed has been a process of mixing these found sounds together to reconstruct three soundscape elements: geophony (naturally occurring non-biological), biophony (vocalising animal) and anthropophony (produced by humans) into a new, imagined sonic environment.
“Trying to work too, trying…”
Owls
Loud has always been synonymous with powerful, humans have been obsessed with this idea although today are perhaps less aware of the damage our ‘silent’ presence can do. For parts of Rewindwild I also used a magnetic coil pickup to record some of the everyday sounds that we don’t hear, I recorded mobile phones and the sound of YouTube (while watching some Bernie Kraus Ted talks…) to get the electric fizz and crackle you hear. Just as much of the vocalising animal sounds in the wild are beyond the limits of our hearing, so is the constant bustle of this invisible anthropophony, our technology.
It isn’t beyond the hearing and interaction of a lot of these creatures however, and so I wanted to use it in the piece to get in the way of what our ear might be more naturally drawn to – the sound of three tawny owlets branching late one evening this Spring is the closest the piece gets to silence – the buzz and blips of the coil picking up what we can’t hear, and hopefully demonstrating how we might be unaware of our effect on these important animal communications.
“Looking, was looking…”
Driving
On a hot sunny weekend in the Lake District I followed a route that would be familiar to a lot of tourists, from the motorway junction to Tarn Hows, a Victorian hotspot that has lost none of its popularity. I drove this route in reverse on a Saturday as the area was beginning to fill up with visitors again.
Without deciding what I wanted to record I decided to choose sixteen spots along the route, and to record for two minutes in each place out of the van window before moving on. You hear the route five times in the piece, with thirteen of the locations each reduced to two seconds of audio and following one another in order as a journey from the centre of the Lakes, to the rushing motorway conduit, the point of entry for many people. My hope is that these fragments become recognisable characters in the pattern of the piece, even when played backwards, slowed down and transposed so that in the end they sound more like a geophonic texture, which you can choose to listen to/ignore as it blurs into a sonic background, as we do the dull, worrying quiet of these visually lush environments.
“Running, been running…”
Durations
Rewindwild’s length and structure felt like a mystery until quite late in the day, the gathering of sonic artefacts was changing what I imagined the shape of the piece would be almost daily. Then one morning I took my microphones out for a walk.
When I got back twenty-something minutes later, and listened more deeply to where I’d been, it was clear that this recording could make a good frame to contain the rest of the piece, a navigation in time, of the place I was in. There are a few different walks you hear as part of Rewindwild, and I haven’t tried to recreate exact locations. I found it more interesting to put places in counterpoint with each other, creating a kind of map of my memory when I thought back over the past few months.
“Walking, been walking…”
Clarinets
In addition to this, contact mics all over the bass clarinet have been used to create complex, a-rhythmic woodland floors and leafy canopies, teeming with life and hidden patterns. Half-pitched wind sounds, songs and articulations using just the top half of the instrument have also been constructed into playful gusts, theatres of air and left as untamed voices. This imaginary clarinet ‘biophony’ and ‘geophony’ is combined with melodic material (clarinet, bass clarinet and voice) written during the height of the nationwide lockdown which weave a lyric through the piece.
The melodies I’d been writing were not going to be enough musical material on their own, but I found that I’d been playing them enough to feel comfortable improvising around them and so the process quickly became one of following my nose, letting sounds happen in a playful way and responding to the ebb and flow of how the recordings were coming out. In the end I recorded six clarinet parts and three bass clarinet parts, a contact mic bass track and a whole track of just the top joint of the bass. This has meant that the melodic material doesn’t hold too tightly to a tempo, but focuses more on the suggestions of internal rhythm, it was fun to record in this way and seemed to fit with the ideas behind the piece much more than a rigid score. My hope is that these elements all combine to create something strange but listenable, an aural rewilding of these wind instruments I relied on to earn a living before the pandemic.
Words
The last thing I added to Rewindwild was my own voice (apart from some humming while I played the clarinet melody at the end). It felt like there was space for it and I was surprised by how personal the piece had become.
The words were written very quickly, and so they could also be read in reverse. I removed some words at random listening as if I was improvising with a rubber, and took out the ‘watching’ in the second set, to emphasise that listening and being in a place long enough to really hear it, are perhaps better ways of discerning how ‘wild’ it might be. Rewindwild plays out like a quarried cathedral of audio, leaving space for the listener to be transported to the intricate, wild, tranquil and vast Lakes-spaces they know, imagine and negate by their ordinary presence.
“Listening, been listening…”
Rewindwild
Thanks:
I produced Rewindwild with the help of my friend and fellow musician Joe Acheson (Hidden Orchestra, Kew Gardens’ Sonic Woodland). Joe kindly guided me through this journey as I learnt new digital techniques and field recording skills. Initial editing advice was given by Cameron Malcolm and the finished Rewindwild has been mixed and mastered by Calum Malcolm. I’d also like to thank my wife Sophia who is a constant support and inspiration, and took the photos of the owl and my face. Finally, thanks to Aerial for commissioning the piece and bringing an exciting new artistic hum to this area.