release date: 20 july 2021
listen n soundcloud
I constructed this weeks episode during the third week of a stay-at-home, shelter-in-place COVID-19 lockdown on Gadigal land, in Sydney Australia where I live, make and work.
Without access to my studio and the majority of my archived sound library, I’ve structured this episode from field recordings I have on a home iMac, recordings made at the rural artist-in-residence facility at Bundanon on the central south coast of New South Wales.
The spine of the piece, a loud fluttering, is a time-stretched recording of hundreds of flies and other insects swarming around a recently dead wombat. Out bushwalking in pathless forest, I heard the loud sonic epicentre of insects advantaging the carcass long before I could see it.
I set up my recorder to capture a 20 minute document of the event. That recording has been slowed to 10 times the original length, to make strange and hear anew that encounter. Low musical and wailing sounds are slowed forest birds, a crystalline drone arises from slowed cicadas and wind.
This bed track is interwoven with recordings of my walking through different environments at Bundanon – domestic, rural agricultural and remnant bushland – and of fire, water, wind and small sonic events made with found objects.
The intention is to create a strangely evocative soundscape, something to listen to and wonder about while drawing, napping or in other ways spending time in lockdown…