Joshua Bonnetta - The Pines

A Closer Listen

Poet Wendell Berry writes of having “the wisdom to survive, to stand like slow-growing trees on a ruined place, renewing it, enriching it.”  On his four-disc set The Pines, Joshua Bonnetta finds a similar alchemy through sound.

The long version of the album ~ if one can call this an album ~ is 8760 hours long.  It is quite likely that only Bonnetta will ever listen to the whole thing, although the tree in Tioga County certainly heard everything.  The microphone was placed ten feet up the trunk in upstate New York, sound cards periodically changed over the course of a year.  Bonnetta then perused the recordings, looking for sonic events, culling the total down to an hour per season.  The result is an active set of curated sounds, the “action scenes” parallel to those in a film or the noteworthy events that one records in a personal journal.

Each disc begins with an electronic tone that gives way to natural sound.  Played concurrently, these tones are reminiscent of the motif of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” minus one.  The comparison is apt, as Bonnetta is seeking to unlock the communication of a being unlike himself. The tree may seem impassive, but it creaks and bends, houses various creatures, soaks in rain and sends out roots.  In “Spring,” one can hear the return of (other) life to the forest: the cawing crows, the migrating geese, the distant wolves or coyotes whose howls haunted Bonnetta in a mysterious recording he heard as a child.

As time passes, the birdsong increases; cicadas emerge; the thunder rolls.  The listening experience is active and lush.  One wonders momentarily if one would want to hear a mirror image: a spring hour without precipitation, in the middle of the night, when only a few such sounds would break through; or a lonely, windy day, characterized more by the creak of bark and the comparative lack of birdsong.  Given so much source material, it would be easy to produce a sequel (or 2189 four-hour sequels), although one suspects the quietest hours might be of greater interest to scientists than average listeners.  The Pines is in effect a “best of” or “greatest hits” of the tree’s sonic year.

There are multiple ways to approach the project.  One may jump to the sounds of one’s favorite season, or focus on the meteorological changes over time, or trace the shifting avian and animal populations, or wonder at the times in which one hears footfalls.  Are these humans, or deer, or moose, or Yeti?  One might also concentrate on singular sets of sounds, for example the different timbre of the bark’s creaks in colder and warmer weather as the tree “narrates” its experience.

What did you do on your summer vacation?  Bonnetta poses this question to the tree, and receives an excited series of responses.  The first nighttime atmosphere becomes apparent, with crickets and whistles, a low-level drone.  Owls call and echo.  Howls and barks create a canine symphony. An entire menagerie has come out to forage, to mate, to play.  In the fourteenth minute, a frog (at least we believe it is a frog) imitates a synthesizer.  The sun rises, the bees buzz, the woodpecker forages for food, perhaps in this very tree.  In the twenty-seventh minute, a sound like distant horses’ hooves.  Fireworks in the thirty-ninth minute: the Fourth of July.  Music and annoying humans, a car peeling out, an intrusion of presence and sound.  Go away, humans!

And then the autumn, a season in which neighbors will lose their leaves, squirrels will search for nuts, flocks will begin to migrate and a slow-motion urgency will begin to set in.  The sounds of the tree are momentarily lost in the cacophony of rustle and rain.  The disc doesn’t sound especially like autumn, at least in the human sense, until the other sounds recede to reveal the wind and one realizes that most of the guests have left the party.  In the second half, the leftover animals seem lonely.  The sonic field becomes so uncluttered that one can hear distant traffic and an ominous pounding; are the tree’s neighbors under attack?  A train horn reverberates through the rain; a siren sounds, but the intervention is not for the tree.

The birds are so loud in the opening of “Winter” that they must be perched astride or near the microphone.  Are they trying to communicate with Bonnetta?  If so, what might they be saying?  This does sound like winter; there are different birds, different timbres.  The early winter is for rain, the later months for ice and snow.  In the fifteenth minute, one hears a sound like a house door closing: a forest pareidolia.  The sap is now flowing more slowly; the tree is conserving its warmth.  Snowmobilers pass by, engines roaring.  The tree has accumulated another ring.

Those contributing words to the project find different nuances to the sounds.  Jake Moore suspects that the tree knows it is being recorded and heard.  Robert Macfarlane is reminded of an unsettling painting by Bosch.  In contrast, this reviewer returns once again to the hope of Wendell Berry’s “A Vision”: “Memory, native to this valley, will spread over it like a grove, and memory will grow into legend, legend into song, song into sacrament.”  In the same way as patient humans discovered the patterns in whalesong, Bonnetta has found the song of the forest, preserved in arboreal time, and presented it to a larger audience.  The Pines may be a slower sacrament than most, but it is no less holy.  While the project captures time, it also opens a window to the eternal.  (Richard Allen)