ACL 2025
Top Ten Field Recording & Soundscape
ACL 2025 ~ Top Ten Field Recording & Soundscape
A remarkable year for field recordings was led by forms of minutiae’s incredible Ice Series, from which three albums made our top ten (and a fourth was just outside at #11!). The series highlights the fact that the genre isn’t solely about the sharing of sounds, but the preservation of sound and source. Other recordings find different ways to highlight climate change and its effects on species and land. Still others locate joy in sound itself, whether church bells, a deep quarry, an empty hall, an entire year of weather or a nocturnal biophony. Together they form a tapestry of natural sound, painting an aural picture of a planet in flux, affected by forces both natural and human. While listening, one is not only sojourning the world, but traveling through time.
Anne-F Jacques ~ contre montagne (Unfathomless)
contre montagne documents the eerie, hidden acoustics of Montreal’s 70-meter-deep Francon quarry—a man-made hole that serves as a snow dump and accidental wetland. Through a fence hole, Anne-F captures the site’s hollow drones, metallic scrapes, and insectoid life across seasons, framing industrial absence as a resonant, polluted ecosystem. The recordings feel clandestine and cold, with passing trains and winter winds editing the silence of this urban glacier. It is a profound study of emptiness, where nature stubbornly thrives within the voids civilization creates and then forgets. (Joseph Sannicandro)
éric la casa ~ Zones Portuaires 2
The unintentionally relevant Zones Portuaires 2 landed at the same time as global tariffs began to fluctuate, calling attention to international ports and the people who work there. Having already released an album of harbor recordings with cédric peyronnet, the artist returned to what would this year become the scene of a crime; or more properly, many crimes. la casa offers a score to the sea, the mighty ships and the essential crews of these liminal spaces. (Richard Allen)
Jake Muir ~ Campana Sonans (enmossed)
Jake Muir transforms field recordings into a devotional study of sacred acoustics and communal ritual. The sound artist juxtaposes the rhythmic, time-keeping peals of Berlin’s churches with the intricate, mathematical “change-ringing” of England, stretching these tones into evocative drones and ambient lattices. By weaving in the ambient sounds of ringers, passers-by, and echoing streets, Muir creates a living portrait of these spaces that blurs history with the present moment. The result is a deeply meditative work that elevates the bell from a religious marker to a universal locus of time, community, and vanishing tradition. (Joseph Sannicandro)
Joshua Bonnetta ~ The Pines (Shelter Press)
One of the most ambitious projects we’ve ever encountered, The Pines is the distillation of 8760 hours of recording, divided into four distinct seasons in the life of a tree. Bonnetta focuses on the points of dynamic contrast: the wild weather, the unruly visitors, the creatures going about their daily activity, unaware they are being recorded. The treasure is in the subtle changes made sharp by the compression of time; as winter falls, a vast hush is visited upon the land. (Richard Allen)
Ludwig Berger & Vadret da Morteratsch ~ Crying Glacier (forms of minutiae)
To listen without context is to hear bike wheels, babies and ducks, none of which are present. One can begin to understand how earlier societies heard the sounds of sprites, goblins, fae folk and the like; anthropomorphic tendencies run deep. And yet, the glacier may as well be crying as it melts, saying goodbye to its hydrogen and oxygen as they slip into the stream, sighing a frigid version of the famous question, “Is it nothing to you, all who pass by?” (Richard Allen)
Martina Testen / Simon Šerc ~ Nokturno (Pharmafabriek)
The sequel to Biodukt, which made this list in 2020, Nokturno is the sound of a single night, from dusk to dawn, rich in complexity and rife with meaning. The creatures appear at different times, staggering their appearance, finding ways in which to co-exist. The thunder rolls; the residents react. Church bells suggest a divine hand. As the frogs surface, the animals emerge from their holes and the birds begin to sing again, what ideas might rule their thoughts? (Richard Allen)
pablo diserens ~ ebbing ice lines (forms of minutiae)
The theme of melting glaciers is by now a commonplace in the art of field recording. Its tragic quality is a strong background for its impact; Diserens, however, has decided to put an emphasis elsewhere, on the living process of these environments. One of the pieces is directly a set of ecological reflections, and the album integrates the aural dialogue between the changing landscape and the animals witnessing it, including humans. This makes Ebbing Ice Lines different from the usual conservationist melancholy, without altogether making an opposite statement: the glaciers do not merely represent or contain life, but are an aurally evident part of its systems, changing. (David Murrieta Flores)
Tomáš Šenkyřík & Pavel Zlámal ~ 306 (okla records)
Field recording is often marked by a documentary approach, an aestheticization of reality. With 306, Šenkyřík & Zlámal take the contrary route: by means of collage juxtaposing aural documentation, instrumental reinvention of the original space of recording, and intricate studio processing, they present a realization of aesthetics. These sounds construct the reality of a commemorative event in musical and national Czech history, as a clash defined by contemporaneity – different times converging without definite direction, actually lived events turned artifice, a mesh of modernity’s fragmentations of experience, all at once. You are here, and yet you will never be. (David Murrieta Flores)
Various Artists ~ Sounds of the Wetlands (Gruenrekorder)
This remarkable two-disc set achieves something few would have thought possible: it makes one want to visit the wetlands. Forever in the shadow of other bodies of water (oceans, lakes, streams), wetland areas possess their own unique allure, from the visual to the sonic. An incredible range of biodiversity is found within. A secondary theme is the aural intrusion of planes above the London Wetland Center; the agitation of the denizens below may be imagined, but if the listener is affected, one can imagine the impact on the local population, human and otherwise. (Richard Allen)
Yoichi Kamimura ~ ryūhyō (forms of minutiae)
Also appearing on our list of The Year’s Best Winter Music, ryūhyō does in fact sound like music, beguiling and strange. These are recordings of drift ice in the Sea of Okhotsk, an aural array in constant motion, changing minute by minute and year by year, to the extent that the older noises have become extinct. One day these noises will also fade; we are fortunate to hear them now, while we still have a chance to protect this precious, stabilizing resource. (Richard Allen)
Thank you so much for this incredible series. I am all but drowning myself in extremely interesting left-field music, most of which I had not heard of before.