Field Recordings

Valeria Luiselli/Ricardo Giraldo/Leo Heiblum: Echoes from the Borderlands

| Tyran Grillo

Caminante, no hay puentes, se hace puentes al andar.
–Gloria Anzaldúa

Echoes from the Borderlands is a collective comprised of Valeria Luiselli, Ricardo Giraldo, and Leo Heiblum. It also names the 24-hour sound piece that explores and gives voice to areas of interstate violence along the U.S.-Mexico border. At the core of this sonic experience is a living canvas of sorts, a vibrational palimpsest built from binaural and quadraphonic recordings. Into this are woven archival recordings and other voices, authored by Luiselli, which move through the piece as necessary witness and disturbance. The result is a constellation of counternarratives to the official stories that pervade our newscycle, allowing Indigenous, brown, and black perspectives to keep pace with the conventional histories that ignore or kill them. The land itself serves neither as an abstraction nor as a mere foil for sociopolitical musings. It is a witness whose testimony has been buried under weary curricula and the administrative trance of empire. In this way, the project upsets the schema that dominates our lives in standard parochial models, not by refuting them point by point, but by placing beside them a deeper grammar of residue and return.

The present chapbook is the first study in this hallway, a narrow, illuminated passage that provides insight into the project’s core values and perspectives. Subtitled “Call You When I Get Home,” it exceeds the categories of reading and auditory experience, even as readers can scan a QR code to access its accompanying audio file. It is interactive in the most imperative sense. The pages are divided into three columns of text: the left representing the voices of imagined personas, which the reader is encouraged to read aloud during the allotted timestamps; the right containing interviews and archival materials; the middle holding field recordings taken during the authors’ travels across California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Over the course of 71 minutes, the reader becomes an implicative subject who must regard their own life experiences and histories as braided into those of maiming and erasure. To listen is to enter a chamber in which history does not sit behind glass but presses its mouth to the present tense.

The sounds open with a clear recording of humpback whales off the Pacific Coast, bringing us into dialogue with nature, a realm in which the cares of human self-interest have no throne. Yet this solace is short-lived because the first voice we hear questions why, in creation myths, the earth and sky are always “cloven asunder.” Must everything be broken to be told? Then again, such is the nature of trauma: we must be fragmented before we can be made whole. And our tormenters know and exploit this intimately. Stories get stolen, butchered, and consumed until they turn into the feces of time, buried along with the rest of our detritus in the middens of the forgotten. In this opening movement, the piece establishes one of its fiercest claims: that creation and destruction have too often been forced into the same orality, and that origin stories carry their own hidden instruments of cutting. Every atom is narrated by those who learn to split it.

The border, then, is the “margin of a page,” a place where the real commentary begins and where the thoughts we hold dear can manifest beyond what is published, printed, and codified. One voice, for example, tells us about the many iterations of the border wall since President Truman erected the first in 1945, just after World War II. Not coincidentally, those initial chain-link fences were dug from the very desert where Japanese Americans were interned before being trucked to the border. “Each president,” we are reminded, “has since potlucked his bit of iron, steel, cement, mesh, and wire.” Despite what legacy media would have us believe, no one in recent history is guiltless of this charge. Everyone has that dust and ballast on their hands. In light of this, the border does not emerge here as a fixed line but as an accumulating technology of dread, a ceremonial scar renewed by the ritual polishing of fear on a national level. Its materials migrate across history with obscene efficiency. What once enclosed the demonized now repels the displaced. The same metal keeps changing uniforms.

Many of the archival voices concern how true love gets trampled by systemic pressures of citizenship, feeling lost and found by the enemy. We hear the sounds of people crossing the border, their bodies reduced to mechanical baggage that reflects time in constant reversal. Desire itself is subject to inspection, while kinship must answer to paperwork. The body, in transit, is converted into a problem of storage, the metaphysical insult of being processed by a system that cannot recognize the sacred velocity of arrival.

An unheard story then emerges: voices of detention center inhabitants whose lives have been confined to shells of their former selves. Children are taken from their parents and kept “in their place.” Woven into their testimony are histories of early-20th-century racial eugenics in the U.S., which, let it not be forgotten, would become the model for Nazi Germany. The haunting audio of a promo film about the lushness of revitalized land, using water to bring newness to the desert, arrives at the expense of forced sterilization. Both involve the severing of channels. The parallel is vastly intentional, the female reproductive cycle and anatomy mapped not over but under the land, out of sight and out of mind, so that the infrastructural powers that be need not acknowledge the effects of their own actions. The fantasy of improvement conceals a theater of extraction. The project asks us to hear irrigation as incision, settlement as anesthesia, and fertility as a field administered by those who confuse conquest with care. But the land cannot be settled, for it is constantly in motion. Those who kill try to force the illusion of its stillness, yet entropy always wins. The only certainty is possibility.

“And which story do you believe in?” we are asked. Only then do we realize the luxury of not answering, of turning both the physical and metaphorical page, tuning the radar dishes of our ears to off-planet signals while terrestrial cries go unheard. Speech acts are life acts, birthing newness and assertion that someone was here. They are the vibrational footprints most easily ignored. Yet they can also be recovered and repurposed. What is the point of fear when it is manufactured as a drug to be taken by mouth? The question hangs in the auditory field with almost pharmacological force. Fear circulates through public life as the prescription of a patriotic supplement, whereupon it is metabolized and mistaken for instinct. Against this, Echoes from the Borderlands offers listening as detoxification, not in the shallow language of purity, but as an intellectual and bodily refusal to let terror do all the thinking.

Still, all of this casts doubt on our ability to know what has been shielded from us, for how can we begin to document what is no longer there? And yet, perhaps there is no need to document in the ordinary sense but rather to make space for the old and forgotten paths. Just because one gentrifies the land does not mean the veins running beneath it are bloodless. The heart of the earth is still beating. Knowledge does not exist to be extracted but to be lived and passed on to those with private power, those who inherit not domination but obligation. Therefore, the proverbial question is not whether a tree that falls alone in a forest makes a sound, but whether the death cry of the one falling at the hands of its destroyer is ever acknowledged. We are returned to this ethical threshold time and again, reminded that sound is never merely sound. It is a demand placed upon the living by that which has been made absent, if only by being declared administratively unreal.

And the more we learn of the history of pleasure, and how women’s access to it continues to be medically inhibited, the less room remains for any excuse. The ores of the world are the building blocks of their oppression; that is what we so often forget. Without the materiality of that harm, there might not be so much destruction. From the copper mines that find their way into IUDs to the sand and rock that hide the bodies of victims, they are the disease and the artificial cure, the problem, reaction, and solution, all rolled into one. Because the more you dig into the earth, the more of an excuse you have to kill for what you find. Extraction becomes a philosophy before it becomes an industry. It trains the eye to regard depth as inventory. In the chapbook’s most unsettling passages, body and sediment are coextensive archives of intrusion. What is done to one is rehearsed upon the other, and the wound learns to speak in minerality.

By the time we encounter the long, wordless passage of a Union Pacific train at the 49’40” mark, we must face our own complicities in the contents of its cargo. Where are all of those materials going? Whose financial and political interests will they serve? By the time we wonder, it is already too late, for the objects of our scrutiny are already on their way to destinations we can only imagine. Not the trainyards and depots written on delivery logs, but the bodies in which they will eventually find a host to parasitically take over slowly, year after year, until their role in the deaths of the Other is obscured beyond recognition. The sound of a military plane flying overhead, too, reminds us that the long arm of surveillance reaches into homes and orifices while we sleep. Because no one can hear you from that high up. Aerial power converts people into smudges of movement beneath an indifferent machine sky. It is the same script of altitude as moral evasion.

One might feel inclined to pore through these recollections in search of secrets that may enlighten us about their hidden meanings, but such an approach amounts to an uncut key at best. In this case, we do better to see the act of recording as a living practice, a ritual of attendance in which capture does not mean possession. And while it is tempting to read Echoes from the Borderlands as an index of disorientation or a manual for wandering through the ruins of state-sponsored sense, we must see in its rhythms and framings an affirmative orientation, not so much an act of alienation as an alienation of action. The project estranges the habits that render violence ordinary. It asks the listener to inhabit the interval before conclusion, the charged hollow between hearing and response, where responsibility first begins to condense.

“The ear,” wrote Pauline Oliveros, “is a faithful collector of all sounds that can be gathered within its limits of frequency and amplitude. Sounds beyond the limits of the ear may be gathered by other sensory systems of the body.” Might we, then, read the microphone as an ear of expanded intimacy or even radical hospitality that gathers what the sanctioned ear has been trained to discard in anticipation of the real? Then again, the English word anticipate has its roots in the Latin ante and capere, giving us a portmanteau that means “before taking.” A painful reminder that we arrive after the seizure and before the reckoning, in that spectral jurisdiction where every footstep is both evidence and plea.

The timely charge of Echoes from the Borderlands lies in its refusal to convert suffering into a discernible shape. It does not “cleanse” the archive or turn the border into a metaphor tidy enough to be carried away unharmed. Instead, it leaves us with the difficult splendor of relation: the knowledge that every silence contains a confiscated name. To listen here is to accept that the connection from soul to soul is not waiting somewhere ahead, already engineered by grace, but must be made through the unbearable patience of continuing.

Voyager, there are no bridges, one builds them as one walks.

David Rothenberg: Secret Sounds of Ponds (Book Review)

| Tyran Grillo

“The pond is the teacher, underwater lies the source.”
–David Rothenberg

Near the apartment complex I once called home, before I migrated to my present dwelling, a pond would awaken each night in amphibious utterances. Frogs, crickets, and invisible choir members released a polyphony of chirrups and croaks that spilled into the humid dark. It was alluring enough that I found myself inventing post-meridian errands just to step outside and listen. I remember how the air trembled with that sound, neither wild nor domestic, a liminal language that both invited and eluded comprehension. I never tried to categorize it then; it was enough to be absorbed. What struck me most was its irregularity, a music without time signatures, and yet, the longer I listened, the more I could discern the soloists from within, the deliberate from the accidental. What I did not realize, however, was that this was only the surface of a deeper, secret orchestra playing just beneath my feet.

It was during the stillness of the pandemic that musician, philosopher, educator, and animal collaborator David Rothenberg turned his own attention downward. He found that ponds, those apparently placid mirrors of sky and branch, are paradoxical entities: tranquil to the eye, yet pulsing with invisible sound. Above the water, a hush. Below, a thicket of sonic life. But how does one hear through liquid? Rothenberg, already attuned to the songs of whales, found his usual instruments inadequate. He commissioned a hydrophone capable not merely of recording but of touching sound, translating the tactile shimmer of aquatic vibration into something audible. In doing so, he discovered not merely a pond but a pulse, a murmuring node within the living organism of the planet. In this submerged language, he recognized that the world itself is always breathing, whispering, and improvising at the edge of consciousness. The recordings discussed and contextualized in Secret Sounds of Ponds feel like a revelation, a form of listening that brushes the hair of the mind, a continuous and organic ASMR channel that one can tune into and out of at will.

Yet the music is not only animal. The flora, too, contribute their delicate speech: plants releasing oxygen bubbles as miniature offerings, each a syllable in an ancient conversation. “The plants keep time,” Rothenberg notes, “and the beasts carry a tune.” One hears this and realizes how naïve our auditory hierarchies have been. We’ve long believed that sound belongs to the realm of motion, of bodies and breath. Yet here are rooted beings, singing through photosynthesis, metronomes of life itself.

Rothenberg reminds us that “even in this century where everything seems possible, morphable, changeable, hearable, findable at a moment’s thought, there are still sounds around us… immediate sounds that we still don’t know.” If we are ignorant of our surroundings, perhaps we are equally ignorant of our origins. We imagine that knowing where we are going requires understanding where we’ve come from, yet Rothenberg suggests the opposite: that both the departure and destination are wrapped in the same sonic fog. Thus, we meet the limits of our perception and the possibility that such limits are spiritual. The indistinguishable becomes indistinguishably beautiful. Insect, fish, turtle, plant: all’s fair in love and pond life.

This mode of listening is not a science but a humility. It compels us to ask impossible questions. If technology must translate these frequencies for us, were we ever meant to hear them? When we call this music, do we consecrate or colonize it? Is it communion or interference? Somewhere, I imagine, John Cage laughs from the beyond, his silence perforated by the croak of a frog.

“For all the millions of hours we have spent together with animals,” Rothenberg observes, “we still cannot speak with them.” The task, then, is not to translate but to collaborate, to become co-musicians in a score that predates our language. Sound may have no intention, no recipient, and yet we crave both. We are instruments yearning for meaning, resonating for a moment before fading into the dissonance of time. Listening, as Rothenberg reminds us, “reveals things alive before we can claim them.” This is the ethical heart of the project: listening not to possess but to participate. Without that transformation, we remain voyeurs; with it, we become apprentices in the grammar of existence, learning not to compose but to decompose, to take apart what our words have wrongly fused.

I think here of Bashō’s immortal haiku, in D.T. Suzuki’s translation:

Into the ancient pond
A frog jumps
Water’s sound!

It is easy to romanticize this image, to see it as a vignette of simplicity. Yet the poem’s true profundity lies in its inversion: the pond, not the frog, is the voice; the frog merely the activator, the finger on the cosmic key. That the frog is jumping into a pond is never in doubt, yet translators have long struggled to articulate that final sound—“splash,” “plop,” “water-note,” “kerplunk”—but perhaps that indeterminacy is the point. The sound eludes capture because it was never meant to be caught. Like Rothenberg’s recordings, made accessible via QR codes throughout the book or online in album form as Secret Songs of Ponds, it dwells in the space between articulation and silence, between perception and being.

Hence the human impulse to name: to label every ripple and rustle—scratching, blipping, bubbling, warbling—as if taxonomy were intimacy. Rothenberg resists that impulse by layering his own clarinet into the watery mix, joining a chorus rather than leading it. His collaborations with Ilgın Deniz Akseloğlu, whose deconstructive poetry conjures an invented language of resonance rather than reference, push this further. Her contributions hover like dreams, vocal fragments rising from the mire of the unconscious. Listening to “I Still Don’t Get How Distance Works,” one feels time dissolving; her voice becomes an echo of the pond itself, diffused and omnipresent.

In other tracks, Rothenberg’s clarinet drifts like an inquisitive creature among the bubbles and squeaks—curious, reverent, never dominant. I am reminded of Ornette Coleman’s philosophy of sound as motion through possibility: music as exploration, not arrival. Elsewhere, the pond alone is permitted to speak, recalling early electronic composers like Ilhan Mimaroglu, who inverted futurism into introspection, aiming their microphones inward to locate the primordial hum within us all.

Most of all, I think of Akifumi Nakajima, a.k.a. Aube, whose sonic investigations of fire, air, blood, and brain waves sought the inner pulse of matter itself. To engage with Secret Sounds of Ponds is to place a stethoscope against the earth’s waterlogged chest and hear it crackle. Rothenberg confesses, “I don’t play with the pond, but the pond plays with me.” That inversion, again, is key. The artist becomes the instrument, the listener the medium. This is not music about nature; it is nature using us to make itself known.

There is a sacred vertigo in such encounters. What begins as fascination turns toward reverence, even dread, as one senses the immensity of what vibrates beneath the apparent stillness of the world. Ponds, like temples, are mirrors of our incomprehension. They draw us inward until we see that to listen is to surrender.

And so, whenever I pass a pond now, I find myself wondering not merely what lives there, but where it came from. Science offers its explanations of erosion, accumulation, and equilibrium, but the heart refuses to hear them. The mind insists on something older, more mysterious: that the earth itself opened a small mouth to breathe, and we, by accident or grace, happened to hear it.

Unfamiliar Listening: A Brief Introduction to Experimental Field Recordings

| Tyran Grillo

For many, the term “field recording” evokes the greatest hits of natural sounds: ocean waves, rain, and birdsong. Indeed, one of the earliest field recordings dates to 1889, when an eight-year-old Ludwig Koch wax-cylindered the song of a white-rumped shama. In more recent history, anyone of reading age in the heyday of National Geographic may remember Roger Payne’s Songs of the Humpback Whale, inserted as a flexi disc in a collectible 1979 issue. Ten million copies of it were printed—more than any album ever produced in a single run. Payne’s classic and others like it endure for their scientific value, serving as springboards for studies of language and the potential for interspecies communication. They also spawned a robust environmental movement at a time when modernity was threatening to divorce humanity from nature. By the same token, microphones can get too close to their subjects, as in Hans Lichtenecker’s “archive of endangered races,” which documented descendants of the very peoples his comrades slaughtered in German Southwest Africa (what is now Namibia). Even the most benign anthropological motivations have fallen under retrospective scrutiny.

I will not be reviewing such projects here. Instead, I wish to examine—and, I hope, bring fresh ears to—a visceral stream of experimental field recordings. While tracing the origins of such an amorphous category can be difficult, an indisputable pioneer is Jeph Jerman, whose seminal work tops the list below. Kindred visionaries in this sphere of influence include Francisco López, Alan Lamb, and John Tulchin. I highlight their endeavors, subjective as my favorites among them are, in the interest of expanding their embrace of sameness through difference.

These recordings constitute a form of sonic travel to worlds at once internal and distant. Some are spliced and collaged within compositional frameworks in tandem with electronic and acoustic instruments, others manipulated beyond recognition, and still others presented as they are—but always with an aesthetic in mind, even if that aesthetic is simply to let sounds “happen.” Their significance cannot be overstated—not because they represent an overarching artistic ethos but precisely because they shun that motivation in favor of genuinely borderless spaces. It’s not often we can listen to a corpus of sounds without transfusing the blood of our politics and ideologies into it. Here, we can. Such comfort means more than ever in a world on its knees, wondering whether the healing will begin.

Jeph Jerman: Early Recordings ’81-’85

Also known by the moniker Hands To, Jeph Jerman first set out with his cheap cassette deck in the 1980s to document the act of listening while questioning its practices and apparatuses. What continues to fascinate about his recordings is how raw and curated they feel. And while some of his most unadulterated work (e.g., Beach Tree and Birds, 2001, A Pyrrhic Victory) is woefully difficult to track down, this compilation of early recordings is a grounded place to start. Lo-fi swaths of mostly industrial settings (e.g., “Metal Fabricating Shop, Colorado Springs”) reveal an unimaginable depth in the mundane.

Alan Lamb: Archival Recordings: Primal Image/Beauty

In 1976, Australian biomedical research scientist Alan Lamb first discovered the abandoned stretch of telephone wires that would define his artistic endeavors to come. Dubbed the Faraway Wind Organ, this massive vibrating skeleton loosed eerie songs at the touch of an air current, echoing since his childhood into a mature desire to record them. That he did, often for hours at a time, assembling choice passages into this otherworldly diptych. Whether whispering the mantras of uninhabited terrain or choiring like a Glenn Branca symphony, these requiems step out of time and ooze their way into the bloodstream.

Maggi Payne: Ping/Pong: Beyond The Pail

Maggi Payne is a venerated composer and multimedia artist whose output has largely focused on electro-acoustic constructions. Her field recordings of “dry ice, space transmissions, BART trains, and poor plumbing” congregated to astounding effect on 2010’s Arctic Winds, but 2003’s Ping/Pong: Beyond The Pail preserved another level of intimacy. Its two 30-minute tracks, recorded in a galvanized steel pail, offer complementary experiences of rainfall through the intermediary of the album’s eponymous vessel. The first catches the rain openly, while the second inverts the pail for a drum-like effect, sealing us in a metallic chamber without excuse for distraction.

John Tulchin: Location Recordings

This collection’s first track, “Fire Alarm From A Distance (Winter Park, FL.),” is indicative of John Tulchin’s questing spirit. It’s also one of the most haunting field recordings in readily available form and an entry into an album unlike any other. The pragmatic titles—“Metal Structure In The Desert (Dead Horse Ranch, AZ.),” “Log Partially Submerged In Water (Seattle, WA.),” etc.— only deepen the possibilities of interpreting them. Somehow, knowing what we are hearing makes it clear how much we miss. Thankfully, we have Tulchin to fill in those gaps with heartfelt portraits of time incarnate.

Quiet American: Plumbing And Irrigation Of South Asia

Quiet American, an homage to the novel by Graham Greene, is the sound manipulation project of San Francisco Bay Area artist Aaron Ximm. Plumbing And Irrigation Of South Asia is at once exactly what it sounds like and something else entirely. Nominally, it is a vast collection of field recordings of various community fixtures, such as a drainage pipe in Madikeri (India), a water pump in Khulna (Bangladesh), and a toilet in Kathmandu (Nepal). Other locations include Vietnam, Burma, Laos, and China. Beyond that, it is an unassuming travelogue filtered through the mesh of a respectful phonographic memory.

Jgrzinich: Insular Regions

John Grzinich is a sculptor combining found sounds and instruments of his own design. For this 2005 release, he gathered personal impressions of Mooste, a rural Estonian village. Insular Regions is among the more tactile albums in this guide’s category of interest. Its resonant intersections of wood, wind, and wire feel like a portal into another dimension. And yet, we are constantly reminded of their fleshly purview, which Grzinich sees no reason to hide. What we hear is what we get, even when we know it has been transformed through technology, because every electrical circuit runs on our conductivity.

Loren Chasse: Synthesis of Neglected Places

Loren Chasse is a humble public school teacher in San Francisco who seems never to have lost that childlike wonder for the world around him. Synthesis of Neglected Places was originally produced as a cassette in 1998 by the Unique Ancient Tavern label. Over the course of eight parts, it lives out every moment in the full knowledge that the act of recording will change its genetic makeup. As Chasse’s most crepuscular album, it speaks in tongues of light and shadow in equal measure, drawing out tasteful keyboard touches as if from within.

Loren Chasse: The Air In The Sand

Loren Chasse leaves behind precious recollections of experiences you never knew you had. That such dreamlike qualities are elicited from unabashed reality sets his work apart. The Air In The Sand shares the spirit of 2002’s Hedge of Nerves, which meshed the crackle of vinyl with sounds of the elements, expanding that aesthetic to welcome wider-reaching absorptions. By revealing the natural in the artificial and vice versa, he pays deference to the molecules common to all matter, guiding them in chorus even as they lead him in kind to voices hibernating until they can be amplified.

Francisco López: Addy En El País De Las Frutas Y Los Chunches

This first American release from Spain’s master recordist Francisco López is still his finest. With characteristic attention to otherwise-ignored wonders, he listens without a hint of imposition. From the patter of a Costa Rican rainforest to the pall of noises flatlined into a language unto itself, he exposes the moribund yet existentially beautiful underbelly of nature as a force of constant transition. Like his near-equal masterpiece, Belle Confusion 969, it reminds us that life is a field recording in process, ever adjusting its receptors to pick up on the machinations of our unstoppable progression into death.

Click on the sub-cover titles below to see my reviews of other vital albums in this loosely allied genre.

Eric La Casa: The Stones Of The Threshold

Collin Olan: Rec01

David Dunn: The Sound of Light in the Trees

Lionel Marchetti: Portrait d’un glacier

John Hudak: Pond

Koura: Shisō

MNortham: Molt And Anecdote

Seth Nehil: Uva

Murmer: Eyes Like A Fish

Jonathan Coleclough/Murmer: Husk

Jgrzinich/Seth Nehil: Confluence

Search Ensembles: Prescient/Legend

| Tyran Grillo

Prescient:Legend

With Prescient/Legend, producer and sound artist Dale Lloyd deepens his Search Ensembles project excavation after breaking ground with its 2015 self-titled debut on Lloyd’s and/OAR label. Although released 2019 on the either/OAR sibling imprint, this follow-up was culled from recordings made between 1986 and 2018 by a range of field recordists and instrumental artists, including Alan Courtis, Cedric Peyronnet, Cyril Herry, Eric Lanzillotta, Jani Hirvonen, Jon Tulchin, Mark Reynolds, Michael Northam, Mike Hallenbeck, Phil Legard, and Slavek Kwi. Lloyd sifted through their previously unreleased archives, forging timeless relationships in reassembly, while also inviting new material to be added through a variety of instruments.

“Search Ensembles started as an archaeological dig in the audio sense,” says Lloyd of the project. “I’d always wanted to do a project that revisited this planet’s history, but in a sense beyond anything we’ve learned in our school textbooks. It’s similar to something I started in early 90s called Lucid, for which we intentionally ‘weathered’ or ‘aged’ the recordings to give them an older aesthetic. That’s one of the motivating factors for digging into past recordings with so-called less-than-perfect sound quality. It felt compatible at all levels.”

Search Ensembles renders each of its sources, both organic and manufactured, as instruments in a compositional array. The result is a catalyst for elemental reactions. As far as choosing material that felt appropriate, Lloyd notes that coincidences of opportunity played an important role in shaping what emerged. “It was partially a happenstance thing. Some of the material, for instance, was gradual—things I had heard over time and which felt both appropriate and available.” Beyond that, he points to a relatively new interest in library production music as a tangible influence. Such recordings are forgotten time capsules, and hold in their nostrils the fragrances of ancient civilizations. In that sense, what we have here is nothing short of a patient awakening of buried melodies and textures after millennial slumber. In keeping with the metaphor—indeed, treating it as more than such—the album lays out artifacts still clinging to dust. Each is a village unto itself, spoken in the language of a place that no longer exists.

What follows is this listener’s own field notes, taken while surveying the album’s discoveries and calibrated by ears undeterred by temptation of silence…

1
As natural causes bubble to surface of perception, each works symbiotically with the other in a conversation so internal that it slips through the other side into an external manifesto. Tones at once distant yet so ingrained in the skin that you cannot help but be wounded by them coil around one another, searching for ideas as if they were physical traces left by immaterial souls.

2
Heartbeats and hints of thunder are kindred spirits. Their children are our ancestors, whose messages make paper of our brain tissue when we dream. Worthy only of being imbibed like plants crushed in stone and brewed into a tea of knowledge, they grow for the purpose of being snipped at the source. The crickets nestling around them are not messengers of the night, but remnants of the day speaking in tongues of sunrise.

3
Birds flock behind closed eyes, touching the liminal covering of reality with their wingtips but always returning to the percussion of flesh, metal, and bone.

4
A perpetual shushing of impulses by mothers whose evening chorus filters out the purest components of twilight. Voices are implied by the horizon’s arching back, flush with starlight as a lotus to pond’s surface. What was once implied becomes doctrinal, yearning to bring distances together: a Big Bang in reverse to the first pinprick of creation.

5
That same calling echoes here as dotted lines surround areas of conquering. Like frightened children wielding chalk on a blacktop, they reveal themselves in a tentative cartography, as predictive as it is unknowable.

6
The insects arrive with songs in their thoraxes, hidden until the final sting ejects their souls into death. They wander as if to wonder, hoping for the sky to fill in their broken choices with the possibility of a new hive, only to watch it die with roll of a farm machine intent only on destruction.

7
Splashes of water eject molecules of death, giving way to imaginary towers whose resonant chambers are the beginnings of life.

8
The printing press of the night leaves its mantras visible in the sky above, while the ground below thrives with pre-cultivation memories. A synthesizer is aurora to the flute’s borealis, reaching in for warmth and finding a talisman that is cool to the touch.

9
Static made biological: a song of conception, fertile in its detail. In the background: the cry of a mother yet to be born.

10
Overtones are undercurrents of faith, each dripping with reason until only truth is left in its evaporated wake.

Throughout this album, things hidden in the recesses of our collective past are being reckoned with sonically. More than that, they are turned in the hands until their sharpest points become rounded. A roof over solace, a library of parthenogenetic design whose shelves are as layered as the rock from which they were unearthed. “We’re documenting cultural activity,” Lloyd observes, “something that hasn’t been documented in any other way or is far less known to us.” More than unknown, I would venture to say that what we stumble upon here is a culture that does not exist except by the grace of those fortunate enough to give it three dimensions in the listening.

(For ordering information and to hear a sample, click here.)