Field Recordings

Recordings of endless border walls, vast piles of garbage, and organs in the human body.

In May, BOMB asked artists how COVID-19 and quarantine were affecting their creative process. How were they making art now?

The artist and documentarian on capturing the vernacular South. 

The musician delves into the sonic properties and generative caprice of resonating bowls of water and melting blocks of ice—instruments that propel her latest album, Musique Hydromantique.

A selection of recent and reissued music by Circuit des Yeux, Áine O’Dwyer, German Oak, The Yardbirds, Davy Graham, and more.

There are actually two recordings here, made many months apart and then superimposed on one another.

Burn, burn offerings… the fire will purify your body and mind…

“I was spooling cassette tape all around my room in a big loop, running it around and through things. At the time, I got the impression I had invented the loop.”

The Ness is a remote and isolated place, an uninhabited no-man’s-land, for decades occupied solely by the military for practicing the dark arts of war.

After being prompted to do field recording for this project, I went into nature, looking for novel sounds, and was surprised to find that, in the end, what really caught my attention were my most immediate surroundings—my home and practice space.

The allure of “ethnomusicological” records is, for me, only partially derived from their exoticism. 

Composer Paola Prestini is the creative director of the soon-to-open Original Music Workshop. With vocalist Helga Davis, she elaborates on her Italian and Mexican background and her collaborations with artists of other disciplines.

As in music, one thing leads to another. A long time ago I received an email from someone I didn’t know.