Ian Preece’s summer listening and reading round-up (and head) is full of field recordings.

My bank manager would demur, but the great thing about music is that it never ends, there’s always more. One lifetime isn’t enough to reach the ocean floor. The downside is, of course, it’s impossible to keep up. Completely new to me is Memotone, Bristol-based multi-instrumentalist/composer/abstract sound manipulator Will Yates (son of Chris How to Fish Yates). Yates Jnr has, I’d vouch, an excellent record collection. Just lately I’ve been listening a lot to his excellent 2021 self-titled cassette on Berlin label Termina, which draws on a noirish, Jon Hassellesque palette of ambience then detours into cyber be-bop and warmly coated techno before climaxing in a magnificent kind of shimmering, cinematic, temple of sound. Where the tape is all haunted shadows and neon reflected in puddles, a hint of ancient Japanese ritual, full of poise and suspense, new LP Tollard (on Trilogy Tapes) is full of daylight, more expansive, open-hearted, airy…pastoral almost. Tollard is still low-lit, however: there’s the gorgeous late-night jazzy piano and soft saxophone of ‘Yellowed’; opener ‘The Marionette’ rocks an almost Portishead vibe; and there’s a sultry banjo twang over the cocktail hour vibes of ‘Laughing Grass’. ‘Door to the Sky’ has a naggingly familiar lovely guitar figure set over a haze of chirping cicadas and flourishing strings – a triumph that flows beautifully into the pensive ‘Rain Bells’ (well, it does if you don’t have to flip the LP over). The rippling synth arpeggios of ‘In the Lark’s Nest’ should feel jaded by now, but don’t; ‘Funny to Stay the Same’ feels like it could have been lifted from a 1960s Japanese folk compilation; while behind the high line of taut guitar on ‘Polly’s Palace’ there’s the almost funky synthesised squelch of a 1970s cop show theme (I can somehow picture Frank Serpico walking through Washington Square Park in pale sunshine). Then, in no time, there’s the tangled scraping and sawing and dolorous heat haze of the closing ‘Munday’s Pond’. The only track that clangs slightly is the trippy psychedelia of ‘Audrey’s Lane’ – woozily repeating phantasmagorical keyboard stabs (broken up with occasional Carnival of Souls-style organ churn) that slightly outstay their welcome and certainly disrupt the supremely lambent chill of side one. (But, then again, I’m an old 20^th century head big on sustained mood rather than playful interruption.) What creams this rich melange together is the lovely woody, fully upholstered sound of the record; it’s one for a plush hi-fi and good speakers; it sounds deep and resonant on my 1978 Thorens. Recommended if you dig the likes of David Boulter and Vic Mars, Beth Gibbons and Ultramarine, even 1970s Don Cherry and Bill Evans.

I remember, nearly a decade ago now, being in a superb waterfront record shop by the harbour in Lisbon, rifling through the racks, keeping everyone waiting on a blisteringly hot afternoon, then finally picking up a couple of wild Rafael Toral LPs from his Space Elements series: skronky, thorny, sharp, experimental ‘post free-jazz electronic music’ – some of it turned out to be music to keep the rats away; but the moss green vinyl was/is strangely beautiful anyhow. Playing them now and again at home, along with some of Toral’s earlier, more ambient-leaning fare like Aeriola Frequency and Sound Mind, Sound Body (knocking around again courtesy of Black Truffle & Drag City), and the disembodied lunar jazz of Space, meant just the one ticket for the Portuguese sound sculptor’s Sunday afternoon gig at Café Oto – but what a treat on a sticky June afternoon: wild bunches of processed electronics; a crazy birdbath of sonic chirruping interspersed with beautiful Loren Connors-style blue guitar tones; culminating in a kind of theremin(ised) bird call and response (Toral is an instrument builder of repute). Essentially, the set felt like an extended playthrough of his recent Spectral Evolution (Mokai/Drag City), a dense, lush, at times warped and woozy bloom of electronic algae, interwoven with moments of blissful grandeur. Cycling back from the gig through Victoria Park, my head still full of electronic birdsong and swells of rich guitar (or, rather ‘a dense array of Space instruments solo[ing] with wild abandon over a thick carpet of slowly moving chords, growing increasingly chaotic . . . yet always fastened to a lush harmonic foundation’, as the Bandcamp notes succinctly put it), I got caught up in a rollerskating troupe, some of them moving backwards through the park, beats emanating from a speaker strapped to one skater’s back – it’s the small moments of joy that are worth noting down.

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I’d have guessed Rafael Toral was using field recordings. He isn’t; the sounds are all self-generated by his homemade ‘Space’ gear and guitar. Likewise, it sounds like Memotone weaves in a distant background hum of cicadas or crickets and perhaps the patter of rain. Either way, as I’m sure Ben Murphy, author of Ears to the Ground: Adventures in Field Recording and Electronic Music (Velocity Press) would concur, it doesn’t really matter. Found sounds, generated tones, synths and guitars that sound like birds…all the boundaries are blurring all the time. Murphy’s book is an expansive primer that will leave you with a ‘to buy’ list to burn a substantial hole in the next pay cheque. With a lifelong habit like mine, happily I have a fair few of these records – from KMRU, Felicia Atkinson, Erland Cooper, Flora Yin-Wong, Toshiya Tsunoda; to Biosphere, Chris Watson, Philip Jeck, Kate Carr, Iain Chambers and Heinali – but the book is full of interesting nuggets. It somehow makes sense, and is good to know, that Kate Carr was a big Oval fan; that Toshiya Tsunoda studied oil painting at university before attempting to bottle the ghosts of the old fish market at Yokohoma by recording the vibrations in concrete walls and metal fences at the derelict site; that Geir Jenssen (aka Biosphere) managed to finance a family expedition to Tibet by turning the enterprise into a field recording trip with attendant record release. Field recordings are often at the heart of that ineffable thing: music and place. ‘A field recording can say so much about an environment, and also brings so much subtlety or delicacy, which are things I long for,’ says Felicia Atkinson, who records a lot of the wind and birds in her isolated garden in Normandy and mixes up found sounds with voice, piano and hushed ambiance (particularly recommended is Echo). ‘All music is suggestive of the past and places, but it’s also suggestive of a future,’ Stephen Cracknell of The Memory Band tells Murphy. ‘If you combine recordings from different sources and different places in time, you can get a really interesting thing going on, a depth of field.’ Like all the best music books, Ears to the Ground sends you back to the records – the contrasting city and rural soundscapes of Kate Carr’s I Ended Out Moving to Brixton and I Had Myself a Nuclear Spring; the crepuscular ‘Dunwich Beach, Autumn 1960’ from Brian Eno’s On Land: Ambient 4; the crackly drum & bass, dogs and kids in the street, distant parties in a neighbouring block and the Cairo pharmacy/Covid-19 helpline that appears to have a version of Scott Joplin’s ‘The Entertainer’ as its music-on-hold, all recorded from Zuli’s Cairo apartment and released as One (part of Boomkat’s lockdown series of tapes); the riverine, littoral symphonies of Ultramarine and Rob St John…and more that aren’t featured: Lucy Railton playing the cello while the S-Bahn rumbles past in Berlin; Leila Bordreuil doing the same thing in the New York subway; Jana Winderen’s crackling sea ice and sub-aquatic shoals of sound from the ocean depths; Ian Rawes’ London Sound Survey delicacies; Japanese Buddhist priests chanting and banging on a hardwood floor to ward off evil spirits, from David Toop’s Ocean of Sound CD; mid-1930s HMV weather records and Gennett Sound Effects like ‘Walking in Snow’, ‘Canary Birds: Several Hundred’, ‘Wind’ and ‘Night Noises’ as collected on the late Steve Roden’s Dust to Digital compilation I Listen to the Wind that Obliterates My Traces; and the track that probably damaged me most at an impressionable age: ‘Providence’, with its amplified muffle, piano and lo-fi answering machine message that sounds like it’s being beamed in from the moon on Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation.

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When I wake up at the wrong time of the morning, 5.30–6, and it all churns and the rumble of the first planes circling London’s City Airport becomes audible, I try to subsume it all into an unconscious state and drift back off. It never works. Similarly, probably the most visceral and vaguely terrifying field recordings on repeat on my headphones at the moment comprise Ian Wellman’s The Night the Stars Fell (Ash International/Touch), which lies somewhere between a West Coast Disintegration Tapes – beautiful decaying looped threnodies for a planet that’s burning up – and the apocalyptic countenance of Godspeed You! Black Emperor (The car’s on fire/And there’ no driver at the wheel). Radio static is woven in with the crackle and roar of Californian forest fires and funereal strings and drones – moving, distressing, beautiful, all at the same time.

Ukrainan-Irish composer Natalia Beylis isn’t one to distinguish between conventional instruments and field recordings either: frogs mating in a pond; organ and cello recordings in a County Leitrim church; out-of-tune pianos in Airbnb rentals in Amsterdam and Morocco (the beguiling Love-in-a-Mist, Edible)…it’s all the same: music and where it’s created are inseparable. Her new tape Lost – For Annie (Project Recordings) features interviews with a bunch of Irish folk probing the mysteries of Co. Leitrim sweathouses (ancient stone igloos, often secluded in corners of fields, sealed with burning peat and moss to sauna-like temperatures, before stripped-naked locals would crawl in and sweat out their maladies); the hypnotic rhythmic stride of footsteps crunching across gravelly paths in newly cleared forest; blustery wind in the background; bleating sheep; a brief excerpt of beating on ceramic sculptures; thick, viscous organ drones; and a kind of muted choral interlude recorded in a tunnel with dogs splashing about in puddles. Recently it’s been the time of year to get the ladder out of the shed and start harvesting the cherries from next door’s overhanging tree. De-stoning then chopping out the pigeon bites adds a whole new dimension to my already slow ‘slow-cooking’, and this calming tape has been on throughout the making of a couple of cherry and almond loaf cakes.  But, even so, after multiple rewinds I still can’t make out all of one old fella’s lovely, thick Leitrim accent: ‘I’ve seen fellas comin’ to sweathouses on earses, you know, ridin’ an earse, wasn’t able to walk…it used to relieve them a good bit, so they claim, I don’t know…[they’d] take off all their clothes and they sweat it, for relief in the head, pains in yer bones…the bad water that was causing the rheumatic was comin’ out [laughs]…they were usin’ them into the fifties…but the young crowd haven’t much belief in it, yer know.’ Even in a boggy, distant corner of Ireland the old ways are under threat. Considered by some spiritual sites on a par with holy wells, many a bemused farmer, often not seeing any practical use for that ancient damp stone bunker in the corner of the field, has brought in a JCB.  

Another staple on the kitchen turntable while making porridge and tea first thing on many a wet morning this spring/summer has been David Boulter’s St Ann’s, a kind of requiem for the district of Nottingham Boulter was born and grew up in and, after a life in London then Prague, has left some way behind (in body if not spirit). Christmas 2022 saw the Tindersticks keyboardist clearing out his mum’s house, and that emotional process simultaneously unleashed a lot of childhood memories and crystallised a bunch of songs around the district just east of Nottingham city centre which was earmarked for slum clearance in the late 1960s. There are a few field recordings – schoolkids singing ‘Here We Go Looby Lou’; a grandfather clock ticking; a beautiful peal of church bells that is somehow a madeleine from my own secular 1970s childhood, twenty minutes on the bus north in Bulwell – interspersed subtly with keyboard refrains, vibraphone and electric and double bass into a beautiful, wistful, melancholic yet somehow still hopeful…what I want to say is ‘pastoral’ suite of songs and sketches – though, the tree-lined Robin Hood’s Chase and Corporation Oaks aside, St Ann’s doesn’t exactly look particularly verdant. Certainly not, thumbing back through Peter Richardson’s St Ann’s: The Final Chapter (Five Leaves Books) – an incredibly resonant photobook of the old densely packed cobbled streets, redbrick terraces, shuttered-up corner shops and factories of St Ann’s: all tin baths slung in yards, dislocated pram wheels and weeds; corrugated sheeting blocking out windows; wallpaper flapping in the sky from half-torn-down living rooms. One resident recalls the problems of illuminating a night-time trip to the crumbling toilet block in the back yard, having to charge past galvanised dustbins ‘with a burning brand of newspaper in hand, in the hope all could be accomplished before the flames reached the end of the paper’. Other shots depict the monochrome world of deprivation David Boulter refers to: there are scruffy kids running around in duffel coats and v-necks, old men standing outside pubs; Ford Cortinas and Bedford vans parked here and there; vintage ice cream and Birds Eye stickers in broken shop windows; the closed-down fruit & veg market on Huntingdon Street…everyone waiting for the wrecking ball. On a misty morning in 1970 down St Ann’s Well Road you can make out the concrete behemoth of the Victoria Centre flats taking shape in the distance (I think Boutlter’s future bandmate Stuart Staples lived high up in one of those at one point); as well as the new pre-fabricated estate of Wimpey-style houses springing up to the east of St Ann’s Well Road, the main road, up and down which a young David Boulter would trudge to and from town. It was to the latter kind of estate the Boulter family were uprooted to – but you can imagine their joy at hot water, central heating, an indoor toilet and a bath: ‘We had our own shed, and a cherry blossom tree just over the fence. Everything came into colour,’ adds Boulter on the Clay Pipe Bandcamp page. That hope – some kind of post-war consensus forged around a progressive future for all (by today’s metrics, utopia almost) – floods through St Ann’s, breaks through like sunlight between the branches of ‘Corporation Oaks’. You can hear it in the cushioned bass of ‘Donkey Hill’; the bright strings of ‘The Arboretum’; and the gorgeous ascending vibraphonics of ‘Plantagenet Street in the Afternoon’, a slowly unfurling number that never ceases to oil my lacrimal glands. But where it feels there’s a slight darkness at the edge of some of the later tracks – the industrial clang at the close of ‘Abbotsford and Hunger Hill’; a twinkling synth in ‘A New St Ann’s’ – overall we’re not talking the dystopian concrete underpasses and synthscapes of Warrington Runcorn New Development Plan; more the weathered grandeur of the oriental interior and crushed velvet seating in the old Cavendish  Cinema. ‘The old St Ann’s was full of children,’ Boulter told a Bandcamp listening party. ‘Now it’s full of birds – very hard to say if that’s a good thing.’ 

Too many records, not enough time or space: Matthew Bourne’s pensive new record of solo piano, This is Not for You, is slowly planting itself in my brain and, well, it is for us, comes from Yorkshire, comes recommended (on Leaf) and sounds, in its way, just as great as his Moogmemory homage from a few years back; I can’t stop spinning the semi-washed out, faded dub splendour of Soul Syndicate’s Freedom Sounds Redemption Dub LP (on Archive) and the Revolutionaries’ Meditation in Dub (on 333); ditto the warm bass thrum, shuffle and piano of Ethio-jazz saxophonist Jorga Mesfin’s The Kindest One (Muzikawi); James Elkington and Nathan Salsburg have clambered aboard the boxcar again for another wistful, fingerpicking sojourn that includes a superbly infectious cover of Neneh Cherry’s ‘Buffalo Stance’ (All Gist, Paradise of Bachelors); The Reds, Pinks & Purples have released a super-cool tape of covers (incl. Mazzy Star, Silver Jews and an anthemic rendition of Lana Del Rey’s ‘Did You Know There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Boulevard?’ – on World of Echo); and for those of us reared on Starlite Walker, Dongs of Sevotion, 3 Feet High and Rising and Mule Variations (and then worked our way back to The Fantastic Expedition of Dillard & Clark, FJ McMahon, Lee Hazlewood in Sweden and Loaded era VU) serious album-of-the-year candidate has to be Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band’s sublime, literary, alt-country groover Dancing on the Edge (now easily available in the UK on Tough Love records). The other cosmic music discovery of the year is Tennessee-born, New York-dwelling tenor saxophonist and flautist Zoh Amba, who blew the roof off Café Oto in the spring with a ferocity and purity that ended in peaceful resolution (underpinned by electro-bassist Farida Amadou and lithe skinsman Chris Corsano), and whose impassioned Albert Alyeresque whorls of beauty and soul are trapped in the grooves of at least half a dozen new(ish) records. These include (deep breath): two volumes apiece on the ace Brooklyn label 577 (Oh Light, Oh Life with unassailably cool veteran bass player William Parker and Cuban free drummer Francisco Mela; and Causa Y Efecto with just Mela riding the waves); a fantastically varied soulful brew of free-rock and free-jazz with Steve Gunn, Shahzad Ismaily and Jim White in the group Beings on There is a Garden – which manages to sound a bit like Television, Galaxie 500, Sonic Youth, Albert Ayler, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the Dirty Three and Jackie o’Motherfucker have all turned up for a Downtown jam together: occasionally a heavy racket of experimental chaos, but for the most part it all just builds and gels and swells perfectly (No Quarter) – and one track on Myriam Gendron’s latest beautiful, spare, folky French-Canadian missive, Mayday (Thrill Jockey). Amba told The Wire recently in an interview that she’d been out at night in New York recording train sounds for a new record: ‘Every time I’m going into music or sound, I’m plunging deep. I think that desire and intensity – it sounds intense, but it’s also the most beautiful, gentle thing in the world.’ Sure thing.

Thanks to Thurston Preece and Howard Williams