10 February 2022, the season of Burran in Eora Country, I walked west downhill towards Rushcutters Bay. Dark clouds were high across the inner city and slowly moving north to the Harbour, so, at the water's edge I set up two hard disc recorders one pointing west towards yachts in the bay, the other pointing east towards me and the road behind and started listening/fluting/recording as the storm moved north. The resulting recording Storm:RB exscribes the expression of other beings; a dog guarding one of the boats in the bay is as excited as me by the storm; seagulls, cockatoos and lorikeets test their screeches and squarks; harbour waves lap up a boat-ramp; cars and vans purr from the road; thundering is immersively omnipresent.
To protect the hard disc recorders from rain vinyl covered both devices. Droplets tap this membrane which acts like a skin to the mics – like the effect of wearing a plastic hoody around your ears where raindrops are highly spatialized, loud, and present. The sound is also reminiscent of rain on broad leafed plants, or in Malaita, Solomon Islands, the 'Are 'Are use leaves as percussion instruments, tapping them to accompany flute ensembles.1 This expression of raining in the mix has its own strata, a layer evocative of the sensation of rain touching skin, and because the rain is light, every droplet is experienced as an individual event. The vinyl covers enabled the audio-ed rain to be perceived in a way that is intelligible to us, in a way that matters. Our analytical instruments, the hard disc recorders, are tuned by vinyl skin to differentiate and compress each raindrop as an individuated presence — each droplet becomes a solo percussionist.
Throughout, rain, fluting, the traffic, birds, Dog, all vocalise with Thundering's eco-harmonicity — how all the reverberant tones and resonances stack up, sounding together as a gigantic chord acousticking the Sydney basin. Thunder excites the trees, waters, buildings and sandstone of Eora Country to sing. At Rushcutters Bay Thunder's claps have sufficient amplitude and frequency range, and are sufficiently distanced, so that we hear the resonant frequencies of the unbounded Sydney Basin in a multiplicity of diffraction — one can hear the enfolding of the signal re-enfolded by Country. This is resonancing, all-shaking vibrating-with on a territorial scale. Wharf: RB (15/12/2021) was recorded close by, but there was no storm this day. My attunement is to a bass voice generated by wave energy as it moves and vibrates Wharf.
At Trumper Park on a ridge above and East of the Bay there is a pond repurposed from a quarry. Using hydrophone and air mics I recorded Critter Pond: TP (4/11/22) with headphones on, attending to the orchestrating sonoverse below the water line. Kids: TP (8/7/21) and Currawong: TP (20/8/21) also recorded around this pond are co-creations with to the playful conferencing of birds and children.
The morning of the 29 October 2021 I travelled east around Sydney Harbour to bushland at Neilson Park. In the wind two trees were sounding by rubbing against each other, so, placing stereo hard disc recorders with two microphones each ten metres or so apart in the glade — with gumnut and flute I listened/played/recorded. In the mixed audio - Wugan: NP - one can hear the effects of; hi-pitched insistent rhythms of crickets calling to each other across the glade; flies; low frequency distant engines in the sky, on land and water; small birds chirping/chatting; my fluting/singing; the wind sounding branches and leaves; clearly at twenty-six seconds the two trees touch each other and sing. Flies, wind, trees, crickets, birds, engines, and I play together. After about a minute a Wugan couple (Crow) swoop down, perch on a branch above me, look me in the eye, and join the discourse.
The source of some of the sounds encountered in this discourse from Neilson Park are well known, while others are unidentified and/or ambiguous. The eco-listening improvisor de-sediments from and is sceptical of pre-scripted assumptions — many of which are deeply ingrained in misplaced, colonizing linguistic and music systems. The aim is tune-in to actual sonic phenomena, an infinite maze of potential differentiation whose fundamental dimensions are always being constituted and re-constituted. Becomings must be perceived. Musickin (to use Hannah Reardon-Smith's term) attune to transition, improvise our listening. Things are never fixed.
credits
released September 8, 2023
Jim Denley – flute, voice, gumnut
+ avian, mammalian, arboreal, amphibian, industrial, and elemental musickin.
Recorded 2021/22 on Gadigal Country of the Eora Nation, around the harbour East of the City of Sydney. This Country was never ceded. Respects are paid to elders – past, present and emerging.
RB – Rushcutters Bay, TP – Trumper Park, and NP – Neilson Park.
Recording, mixing, editing and mastering by Jim Denley at Kaloola. Photos by Jim Denley. Cover artwork Clare Cooper.
Thanks to Vivian Spadaro, Laura Altman, Aviva Endean, Adam Gottlieb, and Caleb Kelly.
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