Wood, Winter, Hollow

The cold had a certain warmth to it. Worlds, life, among the layers of ice. Complex sounds, alive, found in the darkest rocks, wet with winter’s water. These hollows, rough with age, nature’s hideouts, were the source of inspiration and sounds for the first full-length collaborative effort from Seaworthy (Cameron Webb) and Taylor Deupree.

Webb was plucked from a bushfire and flood-ridden east coast of an Australian summer and deposited via a 20h flight into a New York covered in snow. From wetlands abuzz with wildlife in the Australia to winter’s wooded trails through Pound Ridge, the sonic environments couldn’t have been more different.

Working together in person has been an important point in Deupree’s collaboratinos lately. Much preferring the human interaction and local landscapes over the soulless exchange of sound files over the internet. With this point taken care of the pair struck out in a New York February to a 4,000 acre nature preserve near Deupree’s studio called Ward Pound Ridge, a park rich in history that supports a diverse range of plant and animal life. While the cold of winter kept most of the animals quiet the landscape nonetheless teemed with sounds. The local environment was hit badly by Hurricane Sandy a few months prior and the remnants of broken trees and debris littered much of the woodland area. Deupree and Webb spent three days on the trails recording sounds and images which created direction and purpose for their album which was composed in the evenings in the 12k studio.

The resulting Wood, Winter, Hollow traces a rustic path of the days in the woods with an equally natural soundset fronted by Webb on a nylon string guitar. Bells, sticks, melodica and the occasional analog synthesizer form the sonic backdrop echoing the quiet, but lively sounds of the winter forest. Endemic field recordings, including hydrophones placed in near-frozen streams, became an integral part of the work creating a subtle narrative that places the album in its specific place in time.

The subtle crackle of a slow flowing creek working its way through a cover of ice and frozen leaves. The faint whistle of the pale leaves of the beech tree that defy mother nature by clinging to their tree’s spindling branches against the push of winter winds. The cacophony of whispered raindrops running off infrastructure and hundred year old stone structures. These are the sounds that inspire and infuse Wood, Winter, Hollow. The rawness of winter in a world clinging to fragments of warmth.

For sound samples and ordering details, please visit the 12k website. CD/Download available from June 11 2013.

World Listening Day 2012: East Coast Low

To celebrate World Listening Day 2012, I'm sharing this piece compiled from recordings made in early June when Sydney was soaked by an immense low pressure system that battered the coast with wind, rain and massive surf.

Kooragang Island Frogs

This recording was made at night alongside a freshwater pond on Kooragang Island near Newcastle, NSW. Kooragang Island is a unique location because it was once an extensive estuarine wetland dominated by mangroves and saltmarsh. However, much of the land was reclaimed for agriculture and a network of roads and pathways were constructed across the site. As a result, a series of swales were created that, despite being amongst estuarine environments, retain mostly freshwater habitats. These habitats are highly dependent on seasonal rainfall but they provide locally important breeding habitats for threatened species such as teh Green and Golden Bell Frog. In this recording, you can hear two dominant species, Litoria peronii and Litoria fallax. These two "tree frog" species are relatively common in the local area.

Abandoned Drains

Over the past decade, Hexham Swamp on the NSW coast new Newcastle has been the subject of one of the largest wetland rehabilitation projects in the southern hemisphere. Part of the project has been the reintroduction of tidal flows to the wetland and as part of that process, an old pipelines that once acted as drains have been decomissioned. The old pipes had been discarded onsite and these recordings were made on an extremely windy day from a shaltered space inside the pipes.

Abandoned Drains by seaworthy