Each day for a week, I made recordings from Tent Hill in Ashburnham, East Sussex. It’s a place with a lot of emotional significance for me; many memories, shared and alone, have been made watching the sunset or moonrise there. It’s a place I often find myself at, whether I mean to or not.
The first day, I noticed the presence of jets going over. Most flights to Gatwick and Heathrow circle and make their turns above the hill. Recorded at 9pm, this sound is inescapable and almost constant. In terms of making a recording of the natural environment, this sound is hard to avoid. It informs the dialogue between the ancient, feuding history of the hill’s past, and the smallness of its place in the interconnected modern world.
The second day, I captured the sounds of rushes blowing in the wind. Placing the recorder on a stile against a wire fence created some heightened and textured wind effects. The exposed nature of the hill means that, even with a wind shield, sometimes the high wind occasionally distorts the recording, leading to that unmistakable baffled effect. For many foley artists or documentarians working to capture natural sound, that kind of distortion is undesirable; it almost betrays a cheapness. I actually feel that I appreciate the rawness of its texture, in principle. Our ears and hair create much the same effect if you were to face the wind. There is a through-line between wind and distortion that I feel deserves exploring more. The recording ends with the distant, oncoming drone of a jet, almost unrecognisable. It’s interesting to me how subtle differences totally transform the imagined perception of the space recorded: The early approach of a jet sounds alien and mysterious, then when directly overhead, banal and ruinous to the wild, dewy and comfortingly solitary atmosphere the hill creates.
The third day there were prominent owl calls in the treeline, which on the recording are on the left of the stereo field. Besides that, purely wind, some distortion and white noise. White noise is a space I love to exist within.
On the fourth day, loud and clear Canada geese cries reflect and echo from the trees to the lakes below. Their calls have a romantic, lyrical quality, it’s a melancholy sound, the reverberation serving as a reflection of the human emptiness of the environment. A space for the listener to enter wholly. In flight, Canada geese represent ideas of migration, journey, leaving and returning home. Perhaps with manipulation of the stereo field, I can further experiment with spacial movement in this way.
The fifth day was comparatively quiet. Less wind and distortion than the days before, but more animal activity. An owl, dog, distant waterfowl and Canada geese are heard throughout. Largely across the left of the stereo field, and far away. To me, it is less interesting when one sound isn’t foregrounded or spot lit in an ocean of largely white noise. Perhaps if purposeful or constructed, there’s an application for deep listening in this way, but for me this recording is rendered a little flatter by the subjects being entirely distant. Despite that, it’s a peaceful soundscape.
The act of ritual in field recording the same place repeatedly, especially in the evening or night, opens you to a hyper-sensitive awareness of not only the raw sound in that space, but their frequencies, routines and localisation. Every time I walked there I felt intentionality slipping away a little, finding myself engaged more with the temporality of sound. I came to learn what sounds to expect; how to plot them and situate myself as the artist within them, along with surprising myself with each new or rarer sound I recorded. One place can hold multitudes, especially one so rich with animal life.