Artist Spotlight is our regular feature introducing you to Cities and Memory artists around the world with an in-depth interview. In this edition, we introduce you to Oaxaca-based field recordist, sound designer and composer Erick Ruiz Arellano, whose brilliant recordings were a centrepiece of our Sonic Heritage project – and find out why the sound of a blue whale’s blow is so special.

I’m very interested in field recording. Wherever I travel, I’m always recording something new, material that I later use to create sound from different perspectives, from sound art and electroacoustic to sound design for films and documentaries.

I recently released an ambient music album created with humpback whales samples originally recorded by bioacoustician Roger Payne.

I’ve also done several projects with sound recordings made in original communities across the Americas and Asia, including sounds from rituals, ceremonies, and nature.

Here’s a link to my discography.

The interview continues below ⬇️, and this map collects together all of Erick’s contributions to Cities and Memory: 

Mostly quiet rural ambience with some nature in between, ads from sound speaker cars break the peace once in a while, and then is quiet again. Very often there’s firework noises bouncing on the mountains due to local celebrations.

I’ve always been fascinated by music, its recording, and editing possibilities. As a child, I would request songs on the radio, wait for them to be played, and then record them onto cassettes that I would later use to make mix tapes. This was my first experience recording sound.

Later, in 2002, I made a long trip through Asia, and I brought with me a Minidisc recorder and a stereo microphone. At that time I did not know the concept of “soundscapes” so I just called my 20-30 seconds recordings “Sound Postcards”. I just regret I did not make longer recordings.

Later on, I began working professionally as a sound recordist for films and documentaries, and started to buy better equipment. Nowadays I have a large sound library that I’ve recorded in more than 30 countries over the last 20 years. With these sounds, I create different sound narratives from sound design for film to sound art and electroacoustic music.

What I love the most is travelling, discovering new places, imagining what this new place will sound like and getting amazed by other sound I did not expect.

I love finding those sounds that make a space, a place, unique, and being able to record those sounds. The moment I hit record, that sound stays in my mind forever, becoming something special, a treasure, a jewel to remember always and forever.

Curanderos I is an album I made with sound recordings in huixarica, nahua and coca towns in Jalisco state. The recordings include rituals, ceremonies and nature.

Crowds of people at Kumbh Mela. This sound just blows my mind. I have always like sunset birds, I frequently wonder how many birds are making that sound at the same time, how many you need to make it that big.

In Kumbh Mela this same effect happened to me, you wonder how many people you need to make this sound, about 70 million people attending this festival, the most multitudinous human congregation on earth.

Francisco López: I love the way he uses soundscapes to structure compelling narratives. His album La Selva, recorded in Costa Rica, is a masterpiece for soundscape lovers.

Leslie García: I love how she uses science and sound to create dreamlike atmospheres with precise and unique textures and dynamics. I like most of her work, but specially her Microhm project.

The sound of the blue whale’s blow, on a couple of occasions I have been able to record sound for different whale documentaries for Nat Geo, Sky Nature and BBC and it seems to me the most amazing sound that exists.

It’s like a sonic rainbow of frequencies that is created out of nowhere, you never know where the blow is going to come from.

When I’m recording for documentaries, I like to use a Sound Devices Mix Pre 10 with DPA microphones. When I’m more portable for travelling, I use a Tascam DR100 with an Audiotechnica BP4025 stereo microphone.

At the moment I am working intermittently on some documentaries and in the artistic sound part, experimenting with the voice as an instrument to detonate different MIDI parameters to control samplers of tuned sounds to generate ambient atmospheres with a light noise touch.