I have a growing pile of unlistened to records gathered over the first half of the year or so. I am slowly working my way through them, listening purely for pleasure, but also listening for some sparks of excitement to kick me out of a period of creative doldrums. As I listen through the pile, I will write down some thoughts. These are not intended to work as reviews as such … but more something like the musings referred to in my initial introductory post … to bounce and shake my thoughts around a little.

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Martin Brandlmayr : Interstitial spaces : Faitiche (2023).

​While watching the first dialogue-less 15 minutes or so of Lucile Hadžihalilović’s Earwig (2021), I was completely captivated by the incidental sounds of the film. Footsteps on parquet flooring, a gas burner being lit with matches, water boiling, very thick newspaper being turned and scraped by fingers, the clicking of frozen teeth. (And yes, it is highly unlikely that what was heard actually came from the objects or actions seen.) I sat there hoping the human actors would remain speechless for the duration. I wondered why there weren’t more records made like this; why hadn’t I made an album like this myself? (The influence remains, but I keep getting distracted to follow through more comprehensively.) Many people have made albums from everyday and domestic sounds, Pierre Henry’s Variations pour une Porte et un Soupir (1963) or Eric La Casa’s Paris Quotidian (2017) and Everyday Unknown 4+5 (2021) spring to mind. But perhaps Martian Brandlmayr’s Interstitial Spaces, or at least side A, is the album that comes closest to what I have had in mind since watching this film, despite the stark differences. As there is something in the minimalism, and the absence of overt musicality (despite being full of music) in the sounds uncluttered by words that so completely captured my attention in Hadžihalilović’s film, that is likewise present in much of Brandlmayr’s LP. The stillness of a narrative constructed slowly from minor details.

Interstitial Spaces focuses on recorded audio, borrowed from films, as a form of memory (as opposed to many works focusing on tape, which err towards the fetishisation of the medium and analogue-ness in general). Memories are not captured by precise scientific instruments, re-run in hi-fidelity, nor in their entirety. Memory is messy and experienced through fragments, half-remembered, warped, misinterpreted, with minor things given more weight over time than they had the first time around (through obsession or neglect). Much like the hyper-real sound of the newspaper in Earwig (I am guessing the sound was sourced from something like sandpaper). Highlighting recorded audio’s role as memory’s trigger, rather than a captured experience.

​Brandlmayr cuts and arranges slightly dusty auditory traces of in-between spaces and pauses. A stray syllable, an inhalation, a body movement, background noise. Various ever present musicians preparing, waiting, to play. While listening, I quickly jotted down … explores how once strung together these in-between-pauses can indeed hold the story all by themselves, without reliance upon their original or grander narratives…. only to then read the notes on the back of the LP and found that this is more or less exactly what is written there. I found this sense of a small, quiet narrative, formed from micro-events and the pauses that surround them, simply, captivating. Despite being clearly well-composed, Brandlmayr’s touch is light and in emphasising incident and pause, he allows us to listen to the conversation of sounds and less to the cleverness of their constructed form.

​However, as Side B progresses it deviates from what I enjoyed so much on Side A. Brandlmayr’s role as musician and drummer reappears more prominently. As the interstitial spaces are replaced or indeed filled by a collaged drum solo, the emphasis shifts from the pause to something more directly musical. This does not make Side B less enjoyable, but the stillness and the focus on minor details that excited me so much in this record is interrupted and now lies elsewhere.

martinbrandlmayr.com

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Early this year, I had the pleasure of visiting a handful of European friends. During a conversation with Pierre Judon (who runs Aposiopèse and has released some of my sound work), we lamented the lack of good critical reviews for the work we are both making and trying to find curious ears for. Pierre told me that he had been sent a review by German Sound Artist Stefan Roigk of Yvan Etienne’s 2025 release Les Météores du Coeur, a work I first heard in Yvan’s studio in 2020, in a slightly different form than the one on the published CD. As apart from admiring both Yvan and Stefan as artists, I am also lucky enough to call them friends. The only problem Pierre and I had with Stefan’s review was that neither of us knew of anywhere to publish it. Only after starting this blog did it occur to me that I now had a place to share Stefan’s reflections (with his blessing), along with my own encouragement to listen …

With his new work “Les Météores du Coeur“ on Aposiopèse, Yvan Etienne takes us on an absolutely successful rollercoaster ride of acoustic phenomena: we repeatedly switch abruptly between abstract, buzzing sound structures and sonic artifacts of seemingly mundane everyday routines.

Hypnotically captivating, the seemingly uniform sound waves glide slowly and modulating through countless variations of complex, shimmering grid structures. a swarm of electrical impulses and swirling echoes gradually mutates into a twirling, almost splintering tangle of sound, from which we are suddenly thrown into a sweet atmosphere of intimate idyll by tumbling crackles and crashing rumblings. The pulsating field of pleasantly floating frequencies slows down and wanders almost statically through the panorama, while strange shouts and shimmering cracklings seem to fall from a sea of broken spatiality and intimate closeness.

Through his complex interweaving and surprising juxtaposition, Etienne creates a fascinating soundscape in which each individual element can be clearly and distinctly perceived. Children’s voices, electronic cicadas, footsteps in narrow corridors, screams, crunching, field recordings, wind, noise, wobbling, chirping, floating...: a constant alternation between almost microscopic sounds and spatially expansive movements, created primarily through the detailed use of panning and reverb.

With his rich spectrum of fascinating, naturalistic field recordings and electronic noise, Etienne creates a theatrical dialogue that unfolds a powerful hypnotic effect through the constant flashes of familiar-sounding auditory memories, uniting the piece within an overarching narrative framework: We lose ourselves in a deep void of slowly rising, crunching noise that transports us into a kaleidoscopic magical world and, in a wondrous way, reconciles us with our own banal outside world.

An outstanding work of electroacoustic music... My highlight of 2025!

Stefan Roigk - Sound Artist | stefan-roigk.com

Les Météores du Coeur and Yvan Etienne’s other Aposiopèse releases can be found here :

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Some time ago in an online field recording forum I followed vaguely, someone asked the collective: “which field recording artists do you listen to?”. In my response I didn’t give a 100% honest answer. Largely for fear that what initially ran through my head would come across as pretentious or worse, patronising, due to the nature of the group (largely focused on the technical or commercial, rather than artistic?). However, the question has stuck with me, as an annoying little brain-worm causing me to over-think it in an attempt to teased out what my honest answer might be. What recent field recording-related projects have excited me? Which perhaps conceals a more interesting question: which aspects of this thing which we call field recording excite me?

Given that through working on my own projects primarily with recorded audio, found, collected, and borrowed, I have come to question whether field recording still offers me a useful frame to approach either sound or the world through. I am increasingly dubious of the large amount of hyperbole which surrounds the term field recording (particularly when used in a musical-genre context); it’s oft-stated desire to capture; and the pretence of objectivity. Collectively, these doubts have encouraged me to question some of my own ideas and assumptions around documentation, reproduction and use: and to get to grips with which elements remain important, if any. Don’t get me wrong, I am still fascinated by music and art which draws on sounds from outside and the everyday (or indeed the reverse, which re-contextualises sounds by adding them to places/spaces). Just as other art forms working with the found, pre-existing, borrowed and re-contextualised things do, such as assemblage, collage and certain approaches to photography. However, I have the suspicion that the usefulness of this term field recording has dissolved, so I have been trying to put my finger on exactly where my interest lies within the broad scope of ideas and practices which surround it.

“A painting is commissioned or bought; a photograph is found (in albums and drawers), cut out (of newspapers and magazines), or easily taken oneself.” (Susan Sontag, On Photography [1977], quoted by Moyra Davey Photography and Accident, in Index Cards [2022])

Back to my list. The field recording related projects that I have come across in the last few years which sparked the most interest for me are: Gregor Schneider’s exhibition Homeless which I was lucky enough to catch at Konrad Fischer Gallerie, during a very brief visit to Berlin in 2023; Sophie Calle’s book The Elevator Resides in 501 (2022); Wovenland 3 by Toshiya Tsunoda and Taku Unami (2024); and Seth Cooke’s How Buildings Learn (2024), which I released through my KINDLING editions project. There are others of course, many of which fit more comfortably within the field (Eric La Casa’s work in particular, however I will leave that discussion for another day) … but these stand out for me.

Gregor Schneider’s exhibition Homeless (2023), which consisted of objects, video (with audio) and photography, managed to convey something of the out-of-place-ness while being specifically situated that can be experienced while in, and at the same time on the edges of cities. A wooden palette full of dis-located objects (I am fairly sure culled from previous works in rooms and houses of Schneider’s); two projections, one of a highway viewed across a vacant lot, and another from what appears to be a half finished Thai themed hotel in the middle of nowhere; a tv transmitting handheld footage of someone’s viewpoint as they walked through a ubiquitous urban edge-land. From the promo images I had seen, I had reservations about this exhibition, largely as it was not the room-based works of Schneider’s which I would dearly love to experience first hand, and I almost didn’t make it to the gallery at all (thank you Berlin public transport). However, the longer I sat or walked the darkened room with its sparse arrangement of things, I began to think about my own time wandering around in similar places, and somewhat to my surprise the more unsettling the work became. By drawing each of the things together to reflect on everyday experiences of dis-placement, Schneider created a space within the gallery which I was able to briefly inhabit, rather than present documentation or a re-production of one for me to look at from outside. I left feeling that there was a lot a creative field recording practice could learn from this work, although I struggled to articulate exactly what that was to my friends who I met with afterwards.

gregor-schneider.de

konradfischergalerie.de/exhibitions/46-gregor-schneider-homeless/overview/

Taku Unami and Toshiya Tsunoda’s Wovenland series offers up a project based in genuine experimentation, from within a field where this word has (almost?) lost all its meaning as it is now reduced to a genre sub-heading. Tsunoda’s work in particular has often managed to confuse the term music, as it is typically listened to as music (or it is listened to for music?) despite Tsunoda himself (if have understood what I have read correctly) having little interest in producing music. (Which I feel neatly encapsulates something of the generative tension to be found in the liminal in-between space which much self-identifying as sound-art oscillates within). Wovenland 3 works with audio recordings as the sonic material which Unami and Tsunoda subject to a variety of digital processes and experiments, with an ear of genuine curiosity as to what might be heard as a result. More than focusing purely on the product of these processes, Wovenland 3 raises questions regarding what happens to or for us as we listen to them. Electronic sounds mix with clear and/or barely recognisable “field recordings”, keeping abstraction always in close relation to “the real” (or perhaps more accurately rather its copy) nicely confusing for the home listener, what is “real” and what is “facsimile”. Through adherence to simple processes and restraints, artistic intention is called into question or simply ignored, if never entirely eradicated. As a result, how we hear, listen, read and are affected by the sounds which issue from our speakers or headphones remains the focus, by again creating a space to listen to or from, rather than seeking to document a place.

erstwhilerecords.bandcamp.com/album/wovenland-3

Seth Cooke’s How Buildings Learn does not rely (solely) upon sound, but tackles how we come to know something, a place or a building, by leaning into observation, description and data; and suggests that perhaps buildings are in fact using us to learn about themselves, rather than us learning very much about them. It subtly challenges “creative field recordings” tendency to rely on aesthetics as something of an impediment to observation; or at very least, this reliance shapes a hierarchy of what is important, therefore informing what is noticed or listened to, and what is ignored. By following a different set of observational tools Cooke indirectly calls out much which claims to be based in “field recording” as music, and therefore operating under a different set of criteria of importance. How Buildings Learn questions how we observe, how we learn and what we tell ourselves that we know.

sonicrubbish.com/KINDLING002

Sophie Calle and Jean-Paul Demoule’s The Elevator Resides In 501, like much of Calle’s work contains photographs and text. A report of sorts on time spent exploring an abandoned hotel in the centre of Paris. Images taken in the late 70’s by Calle are combined with descriptions of the images (in black and we assume written by archaeologist Demoule), and interspersed with Calle’s more speculative and poetic text (in blue), and later, the book shares photo’s and discussion of objects rescued from the building. However, the text focuses upon and describes what is found within the images rather than what was in the actual building. It does so by (re)contextualising the images we see, but also undermining their role as document, and the stories we are being told about them. While photography has long embraced its own untrustworthiness, its position as copy or artefact, and acknowledging the copy as a thing in itself, discussions around sound often want to retain sounds real-ness, even when that sound is now a recorded reproduction, or audio. This to complication has lead to what appears to me to be a confusion as to which version of the real we are listening to: the no-longer-here source, or the very present vibration caused by speakers.

In one section the black text describes a photo of a series of photo’s pinned to the hotels wall. The text observes that while the photo’s have printed captions they are too small to read in photographic reproduction, leaving doubt about their origin or subject. The writer then tells us that these photographed photographs were subjected to a Google Image search, which likewise proves to be somewhat unreliable, yet curiously incorrectly draws connections to a painting from the Musee D’Orsay who commissioned Calle’s project, and the painting is re-produced elsewhere within this book. In the preceding blue text, the figures are discussed in the context of water spirits. One of the photographed women wearing a hat, and the author speculates as to whether this might be to protect her from the leaking roof and water damaged building, to add further layers of bleed. From one seemingly simple image, various narrative strands spread out in multiple directions.

It highlights how spaces are constructed (by assemblages of objects, people, activity etc) but also how a space is always in flux, quite often moving forwards and backwards simultaneously, with the narratives drawn just as often moving sideways or running parallel. Calle describes how the varying stages of decay found within the hotel present as a form of archaeology, as if different periods of time have been fixed in place. It is also mentioned that work on the buildings restoration had already begun when the photos were taken, leaving the building to both sinking into decay while at the same time being brought out of it. As if time is being run both forwards and backwards at the same time (reminding me of Robert Smithson’s Monuments of Passaic [1967/1979] or Simon Starling’s Autoxylopyrocycloboros [2006] which likewise confuses the direction that entropy is running).

Clearly with the money and resources afforded to Calle for this book and the wider project, this form of publication is well beyond the reach of many DIY sound-artist-field-recordists. Yet with its origins in the same sort of urbex activity that many of us have engaged in, through its attention to detail and confusion of narrative, it shares what it is to be in a space, or in fact to be a space, and offers up a wonderful example of what a study of place can reveal.

actes-sud.fr/catalogue/lascenseur-occupe-la-501-017986

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I am quietly confident that none of these projects would consider themselves a form of “field recording”, even if we expand the term beyond a purely sonic focus. The fact that I am offering them up as such says more about my own questions and interests than it does about field recording. Which is why I am moved to share them here.

In Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other [2024] Danielle Dutton speaks of translation as being a method for sharing the experience of something unavailable, rather than attempting to make an exact replica from one form to another. Not to recreate a place, but to share something of the experiences which are had in such places. Embracing arts role as that of translating, transmitting, sharing, open up the possibility for experiences and ideas which can arise, rather than the replication of things. While Dutton was speaking specifically about writing, perhaps these thoughts are equally relevant here.

My experience of each of these projects has helped frame a number of questions with which I continue to apply to my own work regarding what it is to be and make in, from, and out of place/space; how we relate to, read or learn from the objects we encounter on a daily basis or in an art context; and equally the traces of the things that we borrow as audio or image? Each work addresses the role of the person or means of reporting back as much, if not more, than attempting to capture or document (not a so-called “neutral” microphone or speaker in earshot!), and embrace the slipperiness of shared observations. Each in their own way are quietly personal projects, exploring ways in which we work with place(s), objects, things, to construct the stories which go into shaping our understandings and experience of the built spaces and places, both physical and cultural, which we inhabit on a daily basis.

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musings : thoughts or comments on something you have been thinking about carefully and for a long time. (or perhaps in this case an extended period of distracted thinking)

Before I wrote this, I quickly scanned an article titled “How to write a good substack introduction”. First up it suggests “establish purpose” and “clarify your intention”, then “provide a road map”. However, for me, this advice seems to have things exactly the wrong way around. I am not sure exactly where any of this is going … but that is where the fun lies, isn’t it?

What follows will be a sporadic collection of observations and reflections on sound, music and art in response to the things I listen to, read, look at, touch, stumble over and experience. I will post an occasional string of photos, and perhaps the odd play-list or audio file if it makes sense to do so. This writing will be deliberately personal, and therefore the topics covered will be closely related to my own making process with its observations informed by the various questions that all too often loop around in my head. I will definitely veer into thinking through writing territory, but I will try not to be too boringly self-indulgent. At times, I will write about my own practice and the projects I am involved with, as a project journal if you will, but more for the ideas they stir up as I do not intend to make this purely a marketing exercise.

At least part of the point of my writing these things down and sharing them here is to give some of my stuck ideas a kick. If I can’t exactly dislodge them, then at least this process should help shift the angle from which I can view them from, even if just a little. Therefore, comments are on, conversation is welcome (although if I am slow to reply, I apologise in advance).

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