A Closer Listen
Where do field recordings end and imitations begin? At some point, will imitations be all that remain? The creation of artificial audiospheres has been popular for centuries, ever since classical musicians started imitating birds. The latest wave of such recordings seems to have started with Kate Carr’s false dawn a year ago, but Twittering Machines, which began as an installation, precedes that. On this single two-sided composition, Kathy Hinde toys with interpretations of the live, the pre-recorded and the manipulated, using turntables and electronics to process samples from a wide array of sources. In so doing, she creates a rich meditation on the fragility of the ecosphere and the encroachment of environmental threats, gathering momentum as she goes.
The start and end point is a poem: John Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale. The composition begins and ends with these lines, transcribed into morse code, although the very first sound is that of a needle of a turntable and the last, after the plug has been pulled, is the patter of soft rain. Keats longs to fly away from the sorrows and perils of humanity. “My heart aches,” he writes, shuffling to a final, lingering question: “Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?” Hinde’s music operates in the same fashion. As birdsong enters, the listener wonders what they are hearing: field recording, Bavarian bird imitator Helmut Wolfertstetter, or studio creation? When the aural canopy thickens to that of a rain forest, the likely answer becomes all three.
At this point, Hinde starts to play her own music: first a music box, then additional instruments, which eventually include singing bowls, gongs, and bird imitation toys, the latter which connect her to Carr. A hundred years ago, a nightingale sang along with Beatrice Harrison’s cello, or the other way around. David Rothenberg (Nightingales in Berlin) argues for the intentional human-avian duet. At the end of Side A, as the composition descends into a series of drones and scrapes, one recalls the encroachment of human society, the disruptions imposed on nearly every other member of the animal kingdom.
In the middle of the composition (or the beginning of Side B), British ornithologist Peter Holden MBE shares his knowledge of the chaffinch. The contrast of nature narration and experimental backdrop is pleasantly disorienting – especially when Holden’s voice begins to loop and wobble. Eventually everything is eaten by the machine, a clear technological metaphor. When the live instruments return, the message seems to be that humanity can still pull back from the brink – although it will be difficult to do so.
Hinde’s recording is part of an interdisciplinary chorus. The nightingale’s song is receding as the songs of sorrow and warning are rising. Will it be, as Keats wrote, just another “plaintive anthem (that) fades past the near meadows, over the still stream”? (Richard Allen)
Wed May 29 00:01:06 GMT 2024