Shards

My head swivels from left to right.

I’m counting down the minutes. It’s a funny way to listen.

My hood flaps in the wind.

My nose runs.

Amongst all this I’m somehow managing to listen to the sound as the wind blows across this sleeping, weather beaten, decrepit machinery.

It sounds like hundreds of shards of rock falling like hailstones. A wide shower of crumbling shaking movement.

I glimpse a fox in the distance.

A red glow from a building behind me.

This is a binaural recording so best experienced on headphones.

I wanted to write more but I was too nervous in this deserted space I could barely think. Aren’t these always the spaces where dark things happen? I did my best to remember some details.

Sea Defence

The sea wall runs for a short stretch along Basin Road South. Brown slabs of pebble dash concrete about 2 meters high with a slight curve towards the sea at the top. I place my microphone on the pavement facing this structure and press record.

It’s along this stretch that lorries park up, there are often many here over night and I assume the drivers sleep here in between long journeys. As I kneel down to set up my microphone my nose picks up a faint scent of shit. Fox or human, I don’t know. 

The sea wall from the road

It’s a beautiful sunny morning, the heavy rain has eased but the wind is still strong and the sea is left churned up and busy. As I stand here on the road, also busy with passing cars and lorries, I can hear the roar of the sea over the wall, the in and out breath of the waves, the crash and white noise sizzle of pebbles being thrown and dragged. 

The sea wall from the beach on a grey day

In the distance I hear the scraping of metal machinery against shingle. The sounds of the latest sea defence work further to the West.

The road gets busier. A Day aggregate truck pulls up and idles. Constant trucks and other vehicles passing. Cyclists hugging the gutter to avoid the angry sounding Diesel engines and screech of hydraulics. A vehicle reversing alert bounces off the wall. Beeps replaced with a sort of screeching sound. I wonder about the research that led to this change. Maybe this new sound carries less and was found to be less intrusive. It sounds like an angry dinosaur.

A brief calm. Dripping behind me. Waves over the wall. A creaky cyclist passes.

The sea defence wall from the beach

I’m interested in this sea wall and the acoustics of it. What it does to the sounds either side of it. Does it contain the sound of the sea as well as its physical power? I’ve been wondering for a while about blasting sounds at that structure. This recording uses contact microphones to tune in to the physical vibrations of the material.

The Invisible Power Mix

The wind's invisible and silent energy blasts through this mix of field recordings.

I made a windy mix tape! To celebrate the release of my Electronic Breeze album this week I’ve collected my favorite wind field recordings in to a mix.

In isolation wind is silent. Only when it comes in to contact with an object does it reveal itself to our ears; churning up the sea, rippling through the forest, vibrating and oscillating otherwise static structures and materials. The Invisible Power Mix collects my favorite recordings of these kinds of sound activations.

Abyssinia Bothy Sound

I recently spent a week wild camping in Scotland with my brother Curtis (who also took some lovely photos). I was keen to gather some Ambisonic recordings and find out if I could hack the outdoor life. I've never really been a fan of camping as I'm a bit too used to my home comforts, but the lure of potential new sounds to record was strong enough, and it turned out to be an enjoyable, if not completely successful trip because we had a fair amount of wet weather which made recording difficult and sometimes impossible. I'd initially planned on getting lots of Ambisonic recordings (even if my brother did think I was mad to carry such an amount of gear in my pack), but I think I ended up preferring the recordings I made with the simple stereo spaced pair setup. I also got a recording of the wind howling through a fence near a remote mountain Bothy we stayed at one night. I used a pair of JRF contact microphones, which record the physical vibrations of an object rather than sound waves moving through the air like a traditional microphone. I love contact mics as they always surprise in the hidden sounds they uncover. 

I think I'm hooked on wild camping now too!

Listen below. Headphones recommended.