Over years of field recording, we’ve often pondered the question ‘what makes a field recording special?’ Just what is it that elevates one recording from the everyday to something that makes the hairs stand up on the back of your neck? In this two-part series, we ask fifteen notable field
“I focused on the name of the narrator “Hythlodaeus”. The master of trivialities and nonsense (sort of the meaning of the composite word) contrasts his role in the text. In that sense I used recordings of various instances of everyday life as small talk from the street, random voices and I used them along a speech by Noam Chomsky and a recipe for a cocktail by a mixologist.”
An excellent field recording sent to us for World Listening Day by Tim Shaw captures the sound of a water blowhole in Croatia, rhythmically expelling large volumes of water as it spits and belches away.We approached it from the perspective of the rhythmic, almost mechanical spacing of the water pulses, and wanting to give each one its own character.
