What’s your favourite use of the nature sounds or data in music?
I really love how Kelly Lee Owens uses these ice sounds (including a melting glacier and ice skating)
Related listen: I spoke to Martyn Ware (Heaven 17 / The Human League), a field recording musician who’s making “sonic fossils”, and a dance producer who used the biorhythms of plants as his band mates on this week’s podcast
The forlorn cries of the gulls at the beginning of John Taylor’s Month Away really set you up for the song and indeed the vibe of the whole album.
Raindrops across here and the rest of the album
The cucKooks
The geese honking in this is one of my favourite moments in music
Picture a house almost entirely surrounded by water, a house on the edge of a disused gravel pit which had been flooded to become a lake. This was Chris Blackwell’s house, where One World was recorded. One of Phill Brown’s recording techniques for the album – at Blackwell’s suggestion – involved installing a large PA system outdoors and setting the monitor stacks up on the far side of the stables, pointing out across the lake, then using two microphones on the opposite side of the house, to mike up the outdoor PA sound coming back off the lake, and two more close to the water’s edge, to pick up the water lapping at the shore, as well as the distant, extremely ambient guitar sound coming from the PA.
It was this set-up that captured the otherworldly Small Hours, live vocals and all, early one morning in July 1977. Wave after gentle wave of Martyn’s Echoplex guitar lap at your speakers as a faint rhythm from a drum machine keeps time (turn it up, though, and feel what happens to the bass drum sound), until, three minutes in, Martyn’s tenor-saxophone voice slides in.
Number 4 single in 1980.
The wee seabirds in this
Flowing and slapping water as percussion. Heard this first on Nils Frahm’s Late Night Tales compilation:
Reading the comments now I’ve learned it was also sampled here (possible there was some not-great copyright/appropriation going on considering the time period):
Blackgaze artist Unreqvited did two ambient EPs in 2019, one that used rain sounds as the backdrop and the other using the sounds of a babbling river. Beautiful and relaxing stuff.
I made a thing out of the sounds of storms, wind, rain.
It’s not very relaxing, I twisted it all into noise. Kind of like the destructive force people have had on the environment. Also the bleak side of seaside towns when no one wants to come. Amongst loads of other things going around my head when I make things.
Green Tea make an amazing noise, new age and nature sounds hybrid. This one is trying to show an owl flying through the night.
I really like upsammy for the use of nature sounds and what they can be, she’s incredible.
can’t even put into words anymore how that track makes me feel
whole album is great, but the more emotional tracks crush me </3 pure, pure magic
always paired in my mind with this
Evan Parker with Birds
A whole album of Parker duetting improv with birdsong.
The lovely birdsong that bookends this track
The first thing that comes to mind is Swamp Song being linked to Champagne Supernova by those ocean sounds. Always loved that bit.