“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 “too-wit” (more like…
“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,…
“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 packed into the small church for the ceremonial note change – the addition of an A pipe. In this recording, the note changes at ~1:50. This chord will ring out until the next change on October 5, 2027.”
“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 arrived there, a concert was in full swing inside the church. I recognised the music from when I sang it more than 20 years ago during an Erasmus in Wales. It was Karl Jenkins’ The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace, an anti-war…
“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 striking and loud. In the distance: a band of seagulls and other waterbirds. Maybe you can even hear the rather spectacular sunset.”
“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 my pyjamas. As I was standing there, listening, a second sound emerged: a motorcycle, travelling through the hills of Rosudgeon and Goldsithney. The nocturnal duet between these two lone creatures lasted for minutes on end.”
“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 rivers are watercourses that once ran through the city in the open air and were later buried: culverted, paved over, built upon, redirected into pipes and drains beneath streets that no longer show any trace of them. They are still…
