Listen to four minutes and thirty three seconds on a March evening:
Or a March morning:
Lake Chapman
Field Recordings and Music
Low Tide Sounds
Listen…
4’33” Under the Pier
4’33” From the Porch
Listen to a quartet of freezing rain, tintinnabulation, cardinal chips, and the space in between:
Full Moonrise and Strix varia
A resident Barred Owl announced the full moonrise last Thursday (ten minutes before the alarm went off). Listen to haunting hooting the Cornell Lab of Ornithology describes as “Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you-all?”
Baby, It’s Cold Outside
Needle ice occurs when the air temperature is below freezing, and the soil is above freezing. Water flows upward via capillary motion as heat moves toward colder air above.
Chunks of soil, grass, and moss are lifted into the air.
These crystals were discovered in Winterville (naturally) during a run through an overgrown subdivision that never made it through The Great Recession. Click here for more photos of the area, and enjoy Ray Charles’ persuasion…
Frigid Fort Clinch
Listen Under the Overpass
Under glazed hazel, fibrous tissue tugs, fixing eyes to matching four inch screens. Father and son synchronize strides along the cement path. Colorless injection molded earbuds drown cardinal song, eddies whispering rivulet secrets, and eighteen wheelers thumping down the concrete and steel bypass twenty feet above. Stopping, the boy slaps dad on the shoulder, points, then shouts, “Listen!” The irony of exclamation from self-induced deafness is lost when curiosity focuses on two syllables yanking son and father from oblivion for a few minutes.
Listen…
Rural Psychogeography
Random horned bovinae and a derelict timber mill are but two curiosities greeting the (intentionally) lost along Madison County’s rural backroads.
Listen to four minutes, thirty-three seconds:
After the crash, Weyerhaeuser closed its Colbert facility. From the 2008 press release:
“Demand for engineered wood products continues to decline due to a slowdown in the housing market. As a result of these challenging market conditions, the Colbert facility will close for an indefinite period of time while we continue to balance supply with demand.”
Let’s hear it for the trees!
Disintegration and Growth
Rusted rooftops like this one on Highway 15 evoke William Basinski’s melancholic tribute to September 11th. Listeners experience emotive decay as looping classical snippets on vintage magnetic tape deteriorate while ferrite disintegrates like oxidizing tin in the Georgia sun.
Dlp 2.2:
Dlp 3:
Camping and Surfing in Frisco
North Carolina’s Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge spits drivers out onto a series of bridges along the final stretch of Highway 64.
Belle Orchestre’s complex and explosive cover of “Bucephalus Bouncing Ball” is the perfect accompaniment to highway driving in the sun…
If curious, here’s the frantic yet graceful original by Richard James:
After making a right on Highway 12 in Nags Head, encroaching dunes battle pernicious bulldozers along a series of awe-inspiring islands known collectively as the Outer Banks. The photo above was taken in the Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge.
A kayaker’s dream, each island’s western edge hosts a tannic labyrinth of canals teeming with waterfowl and reptiles.
Tourists from around the world (and beyond) descend on the Outer Banks each summer.
Prometheus, are you getting this?
Frisco Campground rests among sand dunes and shrub thickets in the Cape Hatteras National Seashore.
In one of Janissse Ray’s memoirs (maybe Ecology of a Cracker Childhood?), she describes a friend who, within a given year, measures his quality of life by the number of nights outside, dreaming under the stars. This character resonated in a way that wouldn’t take effect for seven years.
So this is a summer of firsts. On a tiny ribbon of sand and scrub over 600 miles from home, I camped alone for the first time, and surfed waves above shifting sandbars closer to the edge of the continental shelf than any shore on the eastern seaboard.
What’s next?
White Dam and Eastern Bloc Blues
Remnants of incapacitated industry bring to mind contemporary interpretations of Eastern Bloc sounds. This first sample, produced by the Polish nu jazz duo Skalpel, offers hip hop beats occupied by Polish jazz samples scrubbed from the archives.
“Sculpture”
Igor Boxx, 1/2 of Skalpel, recently went solo with the debut album Breslau. Compared to the lush, polished sound of Skalpel, his tracks have a colder resonance.
“Russian Percussian”
“Fear of a Red Planet”
Aaron Funk is a Canadian electronic artist known as Venetian Snares. During a 2005 trip to Hungary, he produced the album Rossz Csillag Alatt Született.
The concept of the album came when Aaron Funk imagined himself as a pigeon on Budapest’s Királyi Palota (Royal Palace). Its third track, “Öngyilkos vasárnap” is a cover of the song “Szomorú vasárnap” (“Gloomy Sunday”) by Hungarian composer Rezső Seress, which has been referred to as the Hungarian suicide song. According to urban legend, Seress’s song has inspired the suicide of multiple persons, including his fiancée. The song was reportedly banned in Hungary. It has also been covered by many artists. Billie Holiday’s vocals are sampled in this track.
-Wikepedia
“Öngyilkos Vasárnap”
Flowers in the Hood
This afternoon I walked to school to check on our class vegetable bed and take some photos along the way. During the school year, the morning walk takes between ten and fifteen minutes. Avian neighbors’ songs become familiar, as do annual changes in foliage, and the comfortable smells of breakfast. Continue the tour…
Bracket Fungi
Chilean Wine Palm, Jubaea chilensis
Cerro San Cristobal, Santiago, Chile Continue reading
White Calla Lily, Zantedeschia aethiopica
Mr. calla lily lives in the shadow of a cemetery in Valparaiso, Chile. His name comes from an Italian botanist, Giovanni Zantedeschia.
A group of artists tend this garden on the southwestern side of the cemetery. Beyond the lily grows an avocado, or “palta” plant. A sculpture dries in the sun.
Valparaiso, Chile
Mentor and Apprentice
Much of the work here involves restoration of marble headstones and statues.
After exploring the graves, we discovered a stairway leading under the cemetery.
A Friendly Host
The cavernous, open-air studio consists of subsections for a variety of creative trades, from sculpture restoration, to mosaics.
Random curiosities like this mummified cat greet visitors.
Mummified Cat Biting a Dwarf
Valparaiso’s labyrinthian escaleras are an endless canvas for local artists.
Dogs and Cat
Graffiti Porteño, Valparaiso
Rickety funiculars cut the time it takes to scale Valparaiso’s steep hills.
The old funiculars are loud and rickety, yet strangely comfortable and familiar. Listen to audio within a Valparaiso funicular on its way down:
Red Bougainvillea, Bougainvillea glabra
St Marys, Georgia
Elqui Valley, Chile
This bougainvillea adorned balcony in Santiago’s Barrio Bellavista rests around the corner from “La Chascona,” Pablo Neruda’s home named for his lover and third wife, Matilde Urrutia. The name means “the uncombed.”
Street art surrounds the curious homes in one of Santiago’s most bohemian enclaves.
In the center of Santiago, some college kids spent an afternoon of their winter break giving away free hugs, or “abrazos gratis.” In stark contrast to the youthful positivity, the man standing next to his bike was prosthelytizing about brimstone and hellfire, and the second coming of Jesus.
At times it was safer to pull out a handheld recorder, than a bulky camera that could easily get snatched. Listen to a stroll through the heart of Santiago:
Later, we came across a blind couple and their young daughter singing for change. The girl sat on the ground between her mother’s legs. Listen below:
Pink Wood Sorrel, Oxalis crassipes
Until now, I never associated shamrocks with flowers.
While enjoying a bowl of spicy vegan chili, I unexpectedly caught some live Irish music this afternoon at The Globe. Around four o’clock, a group of grey haired men lugging instruments began filing in and shuffling furniture, while forming a circle of chairs around a central microphone attached to a small black monitor. Initially there were seven: two guitars, one accordion, two violins, a mandolin, and a slight woman with a small harp. Luckily, I had my recorder with me, so I sampled their set. I chose not to edit background noise/conversation, as it was part of the experience. Listen to the first two songs below.
In the middle of the third song, a woman in a purple hoodie walked in carrying a soft, violet dulcimer case. A man with a mustache and a violin followed. Closest to the musicians sat a group of five children under three feet tall. One fellow in Superman pajamas struggled to get situated in a rocking chair, and as the musicians played, he rocked back and forth to the rhythm. To listen to a couple songs including the dulcimer, click below.
Pedagogy of the Plants 