Colin Marshall

Album one

I got everything I wanted from my trip to New Zealand. The more abstract side of the wish list included temporary outsider status, sweeping contextual shift and the feeling of displacement for which I thirst. The less abstract included hours upon hours of field recordings, made with my trusty Zoom H4n. (Beyond a few postcards, I desired no higher a climb up the ladder of souvenir tangibility.)

Spurning a compulsion to cut all this material into a coherent whole the moment I returned home — and, quite frankly, not feeling like taking on that kind of work so soon after re-entry — I decided I'd first need some distance from the journey itself. I wanted to approach the recordings as, if not pure sound, then at least as something purer than sonic detritus of the last few weeks. Not knowing how long I'd take to cross this threshold or what it would feel like when I did, I simply waited about six weeks.

Never having assembled multiple field recordings into an extended piece before, I pre-emptively quashed my fanciness by arranging them chronologically. The listener would hear the sounds in the order I captured them. On one hand, this introduces a neat built-in travel narrative — catching the train, then catching the plane, then exploring Auckland, then driving down to Wellington, then flying south, etc. — but on the other, I don't trust narrative. It's a double-edged sword, the other being the lethally poisoned edge of banality.

I figured I'd arrange for chronology and cut for aesthetics and interestingness, which still left me much freedom in the details — almost too much. Would I line the recordings right up against one another? Would I keep them discrete? Would I attempt to blend them seamlessly into a single sonic mass? Would the transitions affect realism, or would I cut from location to location without trying to construct plausible movement?

Any ideas I had about making the piece sound like a totally faithful, if compressed, journey from Los Angeles to Auckland to Wellington to Invercargill and back quickly went out the window, as (a) I had neglected to record in every location, (b) I soon determined that the listener wouldn't be able to identify what all the sounds were and (c) I myself couldn't identify what all the sounds were. The six-week distance at work!

This, of course, matters not; as enthusiasts of the genre know, field recordings are no more mere aural documents of people, places and things than cinema is a mere audiovisual document of human relationships. When Lee Patterson burns peanuts, does his audience care that they're getting the most realistic, recognizable representation of the sound of burning peanuts? Nah. They care that Patterson has recorded sound that's interesting; neat as his choice of source can be, it's merely incidental.

While my more prosaic New Zealand recordings are immediately recognizable — ducks, fountains, boat toilets, that sort of thing — I'm more pleased with those that have, with time, turned abstract. None but me could identify some of this malfunctioning technology, out-of-the-way ambience and esoteric machinery — and hell, half the time even I can't do it. If my goal with this piece were to convey the message "In New Zealand, I heard birds and ducks and cars and waterfalls and creaky floors..." I would just say — or, admittedly more likely, tweet — "In New Zealand, I heard birds and ducks and cars and waterfalls and creaky floors..." Certainly I'd have spent less on batteries that way.

But given sound as my media of choice for this project, I resigned myself to living with its complications. Being a fervent adherent of the "do whatever you can and then iterate" method of making stuff — also known as "suck, then rock" — my other resignation was to winding up with maerial that, given my inexperience with mobile, handheld recording in unpredictable outdoor environs, probably wouldn't sound especially good. I'm into field recordings, but it's not like I know anything about them — I just unsystematically stuck the mics in the way of whichever air compressions seemed richest.

Finally donning the headphones to assess the damage, I found that — shock, awe — my recordings sounded pretty decent! I mean, I'm not about to give Lawrence English a run for his money, but I definitely produced enough to work with. Some, especially what I recorded in the Auckland Art Gallery, sounded almost, to my ears, almost like "real" field recordings. Alas, I had slightly too little city (especially Wellington) stuff and slightly too much animal-and-forest stuff, perhaps, but what can one do — New Zealand's an animal-and-forest kind of place.

I can already tell that my greatest enemy in this larger endeavor will be Old Man Wind. I had a hunch this would become a problem even as I recorded, putting into effect my emergency "stand between the gust and the mic" deflection method. Despite my valiance, the wind's dreaded staticy booming still tainted several of my clips, but I feel I must have learned some important editing skill in my desperate attempts to seamlessly excise the distortion. Or maybe I just need better shielding than the sock that came with the H4n.

But to mask obvious technical problems represents the easier end of the decision spectrum. Given my self-imposed — and, to an extent, software-imposed — 60-minute time limit for the final piece, the complicated question of what stays and what goes becomes more confusing. Should the nearby thudding of moving furniture be included, even though it unexpectedly broke the ambient sound of the location I'd been trying to capture? Probably — it's a fine reflection of the randomness of life, etc. Should the recording-start jingle on my dad's video camera be included? Sure, though ideally not every five minutes.

And jeez, I can't even really articulate to you how I handled the issue of, having selected the precise in- and out points all the clips, how best to transition them into and out of one another. The process bordered on voodoo, but I can't say the result is alien. When I finished a "rough draft" with everything lined up and rudimentarily transitioned, I made like I was writing an essay: I went back, re-listened and re-listened and tweaked everything that didn't feel right until it did. In this process, and only in this process, did I learn the qualities of more "correct"-sounding transitions: bringing the second clip up to full folume before fading out the first, that sort of thing. (Naturally, this rule and others go out the window in certain special artistic sub-cases, of which there are dispiritingly many.)

But here it is, New Zealand Stories, mixed down and 192k MP3-ified for your listening pleasure. (Right-click the link and do all that "Save as..." business to save it on your hard drive.) Some notable memories it triggers in my mind include:

• 7:25 The Auckland Domain a biggish park in the very city you'd expect, and one of the several near-silent environments from which I somehow expected much recording material. I was surprised at its near-desertedness — save the presence of that giant protractor — but then I realized it was like 10am on a Monday. Quick, blame jet lag.
• 10:35 Yes, there is Māori-language media, which I insisted on watching. (There's also lots of Germany-centric TV, for some reason, maybe to cater to the hojillions of tourists from there.)
• 11:45 I didn't quite capture enough city sounds, but here are some I did. Recorded in some Auckland alleyway not far from Queen street where the East Asian restaurants flowed freely.
• 12:55 As soon as I head the Auckland Art Gallery's floor, I knew I had to have it. (The second-grade tour group was a bonus.)
• 20:16 The tone of Auckland's crossing signals emerged as an equal priority.
• 21:00 Located in what Kiwis believe to be the worst city in the land, Hamilton Gardens was quite possible the aesthetically nicest surprise of the trip. Most of that was visual aesthetics, of course, but nothing stops me from recording.
• 22:00 There were surprisingly few non-English speakers around — here are a couple.
• 23:00 I don't even know what song this is, but it's intruded on my life for at least a decade now. (In New Zealand specifically, my life was intruded-on by Cascada's "Evacuate the Dancefloor", which is big in Wellington clubs.)
• 27:08 A local dad unsuccessfully tries to point his kids toward a kiwi bird, which, like the rest of its species, spends 100 percent of its time digging for food.
• 31:35 Though most of New Zealand's children seem eminently non-precocious, I felt as if these two were, in some manner, precocious.
• 32:16 These are "kakas," birds that sidle up and bite your shirt. (They bite mine, in any case.)
• 37:00 This machine, which I can't even begin to describe, produced what was likely my favorite man-made sound to capture.
• 41:09 This is Fuel, quite possibly the finest 60s organ-jazz coffee bar in the entire Wellington airport. (They brought out my tea in a pink service, which I chose to take deeply personally.)
• 46:23 My only recording yet made while kayaking, or, if you prefer, while desperately struggling to keep my recorder from falling in the water.
• 47:43 As pure sound sources, I loves me some malfunctioning radios. (Especially if they're in the Dundedin Public Art Gallery, a neat place where I spent much time.)

I submit that it is not bad for a first field recording album, but your mileage may vary. Infinitely more important: it exists. It exists, and therefore is buildable-upon, preferably in places like Iceland, Portugal, Korea, Switzerland, Belgium and maybe Japan. Stay tuned.

Man with a Soundie Camera

Just last week, I came home to find my brand new Zoom H4n Handy Recorder on the doorstep. Initial dickings-around revealed that it operates exactly as expected, no worse and no better, except that, against my assumption, those crossed microphones on top don't move. (But now that I consider it, why would I want to move them?) So, you ask, why did I drop the 300 bucks on such a device? To make some sort of radio, you probably answer. And that I'll use it to record mobile interviews and the like is a partially correct guess — its twin XLR jacks significantly helped in the choice over its competitors — but I'm also looking to produce field recordings. Er, listening. Listening to produce field recordings.

See, field recordings, for those not in the know, are the new ambient — or at least that's what this one obscure British blog told me. I think it makes a certain sort of sense that one can, when properly equipped, find and capture equally interesting naturally-occurring sonic textures in the wild as they could painstakingly assemble in the studio. (Former Marketplace of Ideas guest) Lawrence English releases some of the better modern field recordings I've heard; please enjoy this link to "Terminal Motor", a sample cut from his all-field-recording album Studies for Stradbroke. EARLabs posts as decent a coverage of field recording releases as I've found. Low Light Mixes once put out an eminently returnable-to field recording mix.

My hands quaking to get out there and field-record, I immediately put on my headphones, fired up the H4n and spent the evening walking all the way down Garden street to the very end of Stearn's Wharf. Along the way, I managed to snag an ambulance, a whole bunch of regular cars, snatches of conversation in four or five languages, joggers, televisions in nearby homes, a freeway, pier sounds, the Pacific Ocean and the background music of several crab joints. Unfortunately, when I checked to see that everything had recorded correctly, I found it hadn't recorded at all. D'oh.

But the night was still young! I decided to get what I could and field-record my journey back home via State street, on which roughly 70% of the stuff that happens in downtown Santa Barbara happens. I caught fountains, music, hobo confabs, arguments, all that sort of thing. You, too, can be transported to a Thursday night State street by donning your headphones and downloading.

Some lessons I learned about field recording from this early experiment:

1. Walk slower. My normal walking speed turns out to be about three times faster than would make for optimal sound-capturing. You can't really experience the sound of anything when you dart past it.
2. Aim for the interesting. I kept the mic positioning simple for this recording: hold it at chest level and point wherever I look. With some finesse, thought, it's possible to strategically angle toward whatever looks like it's going to produce a fascinating sound — if, indeed, it is possible for something to look like it's going to sound a certain way. (Most of the way through my walk, I found myself tilting toward streaming water, fighting couples and a three-legged pug I hoped would bark or something.)
3. Secure your headphone cord and pocket change somehow. They make sounds! Sometimes interesting sounds, yes, but not ones you'd choose to effectively loop for half an hour. (Unless you would.)

More, in any case, to come. A surprisingly torrential rain, by Santa Barbara standards, fell last night, and I was kicking myself this morning about not field-recording it. I'm off to collect more field recordings in the savage, untamed land of New Zealand in early November, so you needn't fear having to listen to Santa Barbara stuff forever.