ACL 2024
Top Ten Field Recording & Soundscape
A huge congratulations to Manja Ristić, who appears on this chart three times, twice with collaborators and once solo. We believe that this is the first time such an event has taken place; and these were not the artist's only albums in 2024! A pair of labels are represented twice, one artist finds her dream come true and the scene receives a definitive creature compilation.
This has been a banner year for field recording and soundscape work, which is all the more relevant as habitats are threatened and/or destroyed in the name of progress. The work of these sound artists not only celebrates the sounds of the natural (and unnatural) world, but the importance of preservation. We are indebted to them for their dedication to opening our eyes as well as our ears.
Alëna Korolëva ~ premonitions (forms of minutiae)
“Whenever I go, I can't help but notice signs of a looming change," writes Alëna Korolëva; "dark clouds gather, winds are shifting course." These premonitions were transferred to this long-form piece, which addresses the extinctions not only of species, but of societies. The piece shifts subtly from beauty to foreboding and back again, the human element more threatening than the actual storm. Through it all, the artist injects a hint of humor, an essential element that keeps the brain from paralysis. Since March, when this album was released, the clouds continued to darken, but every effort of conservation provided a glimmer of light. (Richard Allen)
Bohdan Stupak ~ air raid siren is over
Much has been made of the use of air raid sirens in music. In the immediate aftermath of the Russian full-scale invasion, this sound became ubiquitous. As raw field recordings, they gave an insight into the changed sonic landscape of everyday life in the country to an international audience. Electronic music artists used them to galvanise the audience. Air raid sirens started appearing in jazz live sets and contemporary-classical musical alike. Composers used them to solicit pathos or appropriated them in such a way as to diffuse their threatening impact by turning them into plaintive drones. As sirens became so embedded into the fabric of daily life, they became something one had to come to terms with in ways that minimise their impact.
Producers like Lugovskiy released “Sirens of Kyiv” in two different versions, downtempo and unadorned, inviting the listeners to give their own interpretations and with the disclaimer, “I recorded the sirens in Kyiv last night and made it less depressing. You could download the original record and give it your vision.” In October 2022, Natalia Tsupryk created the track “Kyiv” from sounds she recorded in the capital of Ukraine on 24 August, Ukraine's Independence Day. As she put it, “It is a dark and droney track that, with some elements of the cello and Moog Mother-32, reflects the uneasy mood of the city and the whole country during the past seven months.” Gradually, the use of air-raid sirens in music of any genre has become triggering to the point that even historical compositions like Varese’s Ionisation (1929-1931) are now approached with caution.
Bohdan Stupak steps into the fray with “air raid siren is over”, a track containing multiple field recordings such as the composer and his colleagues ignoring occasional air raid alerts or the composer speculating with his son that air raids and explosions are over. While the sound of the siren is still recognisable it is treated with detachment even when it forms an intrusive background noise to everyday activity. Conversations might be fractured and interrupted, but the disruptive power of sirens is neutralised by the casual acceptance they induce in people for whom they have become a daily occurrence. Speech is deconstructed, treated as timbre and reconfigured only to regain its intelligibility towards the end.
The key to this piece is that the sound of air raid sirens is never normalised. The profound alterations to the acoustic ecology of Ukraine with the devastating introduction of the belliphonic is highlighted in the way it impacts the rhythm of life and reverberates through the psyche. Air raid sirens inhabit both the public and private space erasing any notion of the personal. While the enforced cohabitation is not treated as invalidating, Stupak makes the point that to understand war is to understand that any conflict is about the people involved, not just about some numbers or news headlines. (Gianmarco Del Re)
David Vélez ~ Comfort Food (Flaming Pines)
The charmingly cute drawings of Comfort Foods’ cover art belie the seriousness with which field recordist David Vélez approaches his sonic research into listening to edible plants. Given the range of moods suggested by the facial expressions of these cartoon veggies, one might not be surprised to find the concept treated with humor. Somewhere between the conceptual seriousness of Matthew Herbert’s One Pig and playful absurdity of Matmos’ Ultimate Care II, Velez’s sonic diary of cultivating, nurturing, and being nourished by his plants remains a compelling listen even if one doesn’t pursue the record’s more philosophical considerations that ground the project. But if you are interested in ecological horticulture, coevolutive practices, and the aesthetic and moral philosophy of interspecies coexistence, then you will surely find these comforting soundscapes even more wholesome. (Joseph Sannicandro)
Izabela Dłużyk ~ The Amazon - Where the Moon Wept (LOM)
The backstory to this album is just as compelling as the album itself. After recording the soundscape of primeval forests in her native Poland in Soundscapes of Summer (2016) and Soundscapes of Spring (2017) Izabela Dłużyk was able to achieve her life’s ambition and dream of traveling to the Amazon, thanks in no small part to a fundraiser from the Slovak label LOM.
Coming several years after the release of her previous album, The Amazon - Where the Moon Wept was worth the wait. Izabela Dłużyk gives us a full immersive experience of the Peruvian rainforest in a thoughtfully edited and expansive collection of tracks. Her ability to thumbnail sounds ensures the listener is able to make the most of what could otherwise be an overwhelming aural journey. She goes for awareness rather than simple exposure. There are sound marks for different bird songs, as well as different times of the day and weather conditions in the belief that to listen to a sound is to listen to the entire body of the sound world in micro-detail. And yet, The Amazon - Where the Moon Wept never feels didactic. The emphasis is always on the lush sonic environment, devoid of any tangible human practice. (Gianmarco Del Re)
Kate Carr ~ Midsummer, London (Persistence of Sound)
Full disclaimer, as friends and neighbours, Kate and I used to go on weekly walks in our neighbourhood, a habit we first got into during the pandemic. Both dedicated walkers (or flaneurs to use a more literary term), we used to discuss our respective projects on our morning urban explorations. Kate used to be on the lookout for garbage she picked up for her musical duo Rubbish Music and took occasional photos she would then sometimes use as album covers for Atmospheric Densities, her podcast on Resonance Extra. This goes to show how her surroundings inform her practice.
Midsummer, London is the perfect example of how Carr repurposes the familiar to create alternative narratives. The journey begins on the 35 bus to Clapham Junction, a bus ride I have taken many times before, but deprived of its functionality, it becomes a new sensorial experience that never translates into “audio guide speak”. Midsummer, London is not designed to illustrate sonically a specific itinerary with its meandering quality, and yet it still gives clear aural markers, enough to make one retain their bearings. This is locational listening punctuated by snippets of dialogue, barking dogs, birdsong, and public announcements but what should be mundane sounds, and all too annoying at that, like roadworks or bins being emptied, become at times disembodied ghostly presences delicately balanced on slowly flowing drones. One feels the movable geography and the passage of time while remaining in a haze of sonic stimuli that never feels overwhelming as one would expect in a city of 9 million people. Each sound is given its own weight and dignity even when captured fleetingly. The one constant presence is that of water, which sometimes remains “off screen”, so to speak, but is always there in the background. Listening to Midsummer London transported me back to what I called home, for 30 years, giving me at the same time a fresh listening experience and making me rediscover a sonic landscape I grew accustomed to. (Gianmarco Del Re)
Manja Ristić ~ Ma (LINE)
Serbian artist Manja Ristić appears on this chart three times, but could have easily appeared more, as other albums also received votes. The rare artist whose prolific output remains of high quality, Ristić also has much to teach. Ma is perhaps the most restrained of all her recordings, urging the listener to lean in to appreciate the inner workings of quiet sounds and the soft hum of the nearly forgotten. While the line stretches from anthills to outer space, the most appealing sound, due to its personal nature, is "Dad's boiler," a reminder that there's no place like home. (Richard Allen)
Manja Ristić & murmer ~ The Scaffold (Unfathomless)
A pandemic file exchange started this collaborative effort at just the right time, a welcome respite from the distractions of crumbling societies and ineffective governments. The singing scaffold of Estonia is the most distinct sound and the Gregorian chants of Dubrovnik the most metaphorical, offering peace in the midst of chaos, a modicum of hope among the bustle of tourism, a hint of the divine embedded in the secular. The entire project is an expression of friendship across borders, two artists finding common ground through sound. (Richard Allen)
Manja Ristić and Tomáš Šenkyřík ~ Vstal (Skupina)
Vstal is a dialogue between two field recordists and their home soundscapes, between life on the aquatic shores of the Adriatic and the old growth forests of Czechia. Manja Ristić’s hydrophone recordings and domestic mundanity as counterpoint to Tomáš Šenkyřík’s trees overlaid with extraterrestrial communications. Even without the occasional vocals, violin improvisation and vintage synthesizer, Vstal’s soundscapes are deeply musical. As field recordists and listeners alike know, listening is itself a compositional practice. As with so many of the most moving field recordings, Vstal captures something profound about the relationship between humans and our environments, and the interconnectedness of the physical and spiritual. (Joseph Sannicandro)
Masayuki Imanishi ~ Asphalt/Concrete (Unfathomless)
In one of my favourite poems, “Memories of Earth”, Edwin Morgan imagines futuristic observers shrinking to enter a stone, as “the landscape / explodes upwards” to meet them. We get a similar astonishment from Masayuki Imanishi’s asphalt and concrete. These soundscapes enlarge forgettable background noise into monolithic structures of detailed sound. The two tracks are immersive and otherworldly, locating distinct sonic realities hidden in the everyday world of Osaka. (Samuel Rogers)
V/A ~ harkening critters (forms of minutiae)
Our label of the year only released four records this year, but this sprawling compilation alone may well have earned that title. In just a few short years, forms of minutiae have established themselves as one of the premier publishing platforms for sonic ecologies, field recordings, and electroacoustic music, and harkening critters is the kind of project that defines the genre. Curated by Pablo Diserens, the label’s second non-profit collection of field recordings and soundscape compositions presents the remarkable diversity of animal signals. These “critters” come from all over the globe, with recordings spanning various approaches, species, continents, ecologies, seasons, and times of day. The 4-hour, 33 track triple album comes with ample documentation in the form of a 76-page booklet of photographs and descriptions. Decidedly lowercase, harkening critters is slow paced yet rich with sonic events and near silence. Despite being drawn from natural sounds, the inherent (often noisy) musicality of the world may be disorienting, with contrapuntal rhythms and rich acoustic environments often times more interesting than anything an expensive modular synthesizer can generate. To harken is to have regard for, to listen to and hear. Rather than hail or interpellate (let alone interpolate), the titular critters take center stage, situated within their particular ecological (and acoustical) environments. (Joseph Sannicandro)