Amazon Rainforest :: MANAUS, BRAZIL (Negre River)

Best experienced with good head phones! These ambient samples were recorded in 2008 during a houseboat trip down the Amazon river. The people, environment, food, music, pink dolphins(!), and aquatic way of life left a profound impact I’ll cherish forever. These tracks are focused mostly on water with forest book-ended on either side, a structure honoring the banks that are always in flux that frame the mighty Amazon river.

I kept the audio as in-tact and natural as possible, but do transition from one period in the day to the next, creating the aural effect of what one would experience of watching a time-lapse video of some natural process unfolding, like a flower blooming over the course of the day. The relationship transitioning from one track to the next are also thought out intently. These tracks were all originally mixed to seamlessly transition from one into the other, so please excuse the sharp starts and stops.

Taking the time to listen to these tracks from start-to-finish will be rewarded by little sonic discoveries of unexpected things. Monkeys calling from the trees, rain producing percussive melodies in a pipe, fish clicking-clacking-chattering, boat propellers under the water, tree frogs chirping, woodpeckers drumming, insects buzzing by the microphone. My own footsteps were intentionally included towards the end of these recordings, breaking the fourth wall and reminding listeners this was experienced by a person, that while natural, it was a curated and intentionally communicated experience - that someone was there. Allow yourself to get lost in the natural rhythms and music of this pristine, extremely wild environment that is disappearing before our very eyes due to climate change and human imapct.

Vocalizations (Wolf Park, Battleground INdianna

These samples were recorded at Wolf Park in Battleground Indiana between 2007 and 2010. This soundscape composition moves back and fourth between the natural beauty inherent in the wolf-coyote vocalizations, other environmental sounds like the nearby train, and a decomposition of the sounds to explore the spectral qualities that make up the timbres. I’ll try to refrain from making a bad dad joke here but can’t help myself. You might call the animals you hear in this track . . . “timbre wolves.”