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...

“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...

“It felt genuinely moving seeing this park fill with people gathering to see the changing light. Unified by the same stupid Instagram algorithm, the park was awash with people staring intently into colanders, pushing their faces up against cereal packets and old CD jewel cases, or just wearing large boxes on their heads. It might have been my imagination but as the light grew eerily dark, Gr...

“John Cage’s Organ2/ASLSP composition is being performed on a custom built organ for 639 years at St. Buchardi Church in Halberstadt, Germany. Hundreds of people from all around the world […]

“On the last night of my holidays, I hoped to record the jackdaws that congregate in the trees next to the Basilique Notre-Dame de Délivrance in Quintin, Bretagne. When I […]

“At low tide, the beach of Hillion in Bretagne is dotted with rocks full of oysters, sea snails and other clicking, crackling, crunching creatures. One of those rocks was particularly […]

“One night in Cornwall, around 2 AM, I heard a tawny owl outside the holiday cottage where I was staying. I quickly grabbed my Zoom H5 and went out in […]

“I woke early on Saturday morning to head to Camden, and then Farringdon, to record the sounds of the River Fleet. It is one of London’s twenty ghost rivers. Ghost […]

“Just recorded this! It’s the choir in the church behind our apartment mixing with fire engines.”