Field Recordings

“I set my recorder up in the milking barn and left it for the sheep to tell their secrets to…”

“I heard these two men calling every morning from my room across the road from the Evangelistria monastery in Ano Pedina, but I never managed to see either them or their cows.”

“As night falls in the village of Ano Pedina the meadows creak with crickets and the starlight barking starts.”

“Long grass full of wild flowers, bees and birds, noon sun, beside a mountain path.”

“In a shallow pond lost among tall grasses, I eavesdropped on the marsh frogs (rana ridibunda) singing their laughing love songs as planes flew overhead and motorbikes roared by.”

“I followed a flock of sheep as they went out to pasture in the mountains of Epirus. A little way down the road the goats who lead the flock and keep stragglers in line were let out of their barn. Their rectangular bells mix with the sheeps’ round ones to make a whole gamelan.”

“We picked an astonishing ten kilos of olives from the 60-foot olive tree in my neighbour’s London garden, mostly by cutting them down with a long-handled pruner. You can also hear some sort of sporting event going on in a nearby park.”

“Beachy Cove just outside the city of St. John’s limits, in Conception Bay. It’s a swimming beach but the swell was on that day and it was churning up the rocks.”

“The sound is the rain hitting the sand…”

“Here’s the little snippet from life inside a tent on a windy eve.  This was actually pre the major storms but was still around 40-50 mph gusts…”

“A recording from inside a former RAF observation post on the coastal path in south Devon when the storm hit on Thursday evening! This one is in the side room where the windows where making this amazing whistling sound (you can hear a bit more music drifting in from the room next door)”

“Recorded inside a former RAF observation post on the coastal path in south Devon when the storm hit on Thursday evening! This was made by the front door, which was creaking and resonating in all sorts of cool ways.”

“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...

“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...

“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...

“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.”

“Every evening the sparrows would descend onto this bush that covered the walls of the patio. For the first hour or so they would always make lots of noise, sounded like they were arguing!”

“This nocturnal visitor has been right outside our bedroom window these past few mornings, just a couple of miles from Glasgow city centre. At first I wondered if it might be a fox cub. Today I managed to record its call… my bird identification app reckons it’s a Tawny Owl. My friend, who knows about these things, agrees, and says it’s very likely a girl owl, because girls go &#8...