Part III and final
The story behind the release San Miguel de Bala
chronicle by Antony Milton

The annual San Miguel fiesta was coming up in a couple of days so we decided to stay for that before leaving, thinking that it would be nice to finish with a party and also good to get some more recordings of local musicians. The days leading up to this were very intense as a large group of biologists, 15 in total, were visiting the lodge to hold a convention. In fact they were affiliated with Conservation International, one of the funders of the lodge. It was a very big deal for the San Miguel project and as a result all hands were required on deck and we were asked to work extra hours. Sara cooking in the kitchen and me and the other volunteers doing extra cleaning, wall painting etc. Kind of a pain in the arse really- in terms of how my project was proceeding. One day the biologists went upriver a way and the lucky buggers saw a Jaguar on the river bank. They were a funny bunch, aid funders on a junket most of them. Amongst the equipment we had hauled up to the lodge for them were several dozen cases of very expensive wine. I got along best with the 3 or 4 Bolivian biologists who were part of the group, they were as interested in my project as I was in their work. The Europeans and Americans seemed more than happy to treat us as servants.

The night of the fiesta arrived and what a party! We arrived way too early at 9pm. Luckily for me some of the local musos saw us there and brought down their instruments especially for me to record (I had met and recorded one of them a few days previous at the lodge). The local music is a chaotic joyous racket made with drums and bamboo flutes. Dominant instrument is ultra fast semi martial snare drumming. Fucking energetic music accompanied by ecstatic whops and yells. Anyway the sound of this started bringing some of the locals down, and unfortunately this lead to calls that the generator be started and modern music be played on the PA. Luckily for me the generator broke down or ran out of fuel every so often and the old timers music would start up again. Boom boom boom of the bass drum with calls and shouts, the machinegun snare, the barely audible flute playing old old jungle melodies.

Everyone was dancing, grandparents through to toddlers, and the booze was free. Folks took turns walking around the crowd carrying jugs of chicha (masticated then fermented corn and sugar alcohol), or the much more potent 96percent ¨potable¨ industrial alcohol cheap mixed with orange fizz – the favourite tipple in Bolivia- and pouring it into little cups that were shared amongst everyone. Everyone pissed and dancing in this big old wall-less hall with a thatched roof, the recorded music on the PA distorted like crazy from sheer volume and torn speakers. I think it was 3 am before we finally snuck away to negotiate the snake infested river track back to the lodge.

Then bang! 7am and we have to get up because we’d to catch the boat back down to Rurrenabaque with the Conservation International folk. I was amazed to be actually feeling not so bad… Maybe that industrial alcohols not as toxic as I’d thought it might be?

So back to Rurre… And it seemed like a city after the quiet of the jungle. We’d gotten pretty used to the lifestyle out there. I had really enjoyed falling asleep exhausted every night under a mosquito net to the sound of insects. Waking with the sun. Rurrenabaque was a chaos of careening motorbikes and dust and noise- noise of shop radios, noise of drunken bars and truck horns.
We found a cheap hotel, only $4 each a night and I settled straight in with the laptop. In terms of crafting the final record I had so far been cleaning up and editing the recordings. One skill that I gained from this experience was learning how to use noise reduction filters etc. Quite a good skill to have I reckon- got to the stage where I can now isolate a single insect or bird out of a soundfield full of river noise and wind and lots of other insects etc. I was pleased with that. Obviously this wouldn’t normally be my style- I’m a big fan of extraneous noise- but I thought for this project I should try and be as hi-fi and clear as possible.

So now I set about trying to work the recordings I’d selected into some sort of cohesive and interesting flow. I wanted it to have a sense of narrative, to capture over 35 mins what its like to visit the San Miguel del Bala world. I also wanted it to work as an interesting and engaging composition. There was one track in particular that I made especially for myself however- myself and other noise/drone fans.
At dusk the place would come alive with cicada and cricket sounds. These resonated at such a frequency that they produced virtual sine waves that sounded as much like microphonic feedback as anything. So I made one piece using all my isolated insects and various effects to create the dusk from hell. A huge immersive wall of menacing noise that x-fades into the real thing- a straight field recording of dusk insects. This is the piece that took the longest, days of work, and also the one that I suspect that the actual local folk like the least, but for me it represents the sheer spine tingling bliss that these dusk sounds induced in me.
The other tracks are filmic. A journey up the river, a trip to the village, a day and night in the jungle. These are interspersed with flute and drum pieces played by the locals, and one played by me.

I had been working 9-10 hour days in our hotel for 5 or 6 days- Sara going slowly mad with boredom, and both us broiling in the muggy tropical heat (and getting virtually no sleep due to a spectacularly noisy nightclub – named ¨Bananas¨(!) – over the road), when I got a visit from the manager of the San Miguel office and project. He wanted the laptop back. Yikes! I hadn’t been told it was his personal laptop. I knew I still had at least a few days work left and so we eventually negotiated a situation whereby I would work in the office from then on. To be honest this probably meant I got less done each day (what with the various distractions there (answering phone calls and emails when English was needed etc) but at least they got some idea of the amount of work I was actually putting in, the amount of time something like this takes.
Sara came down each day and did some English tutoring for one of the guides. She was pleased to have something to do. Rurre’ isn’t a big town and there’s not a hell of a lot to do there.

Eric had suggested another project to follow on from this one, a project that I was even more excited about but I think it was just as well for Sara that it fell through. Erics grandfather is an 80 year old shaman who lives 6 hours from Rurre by motorbike. Eric was keen that we go up to visit him and another shaman to record their traditional music. This music is an integral part of their magical tradition and each shaman specialises in a particular magical instrument. For Erics grandfather this is bone flutes that he has made from various animals. The other shaman utilises ‘violins’ that he makes from sacred animal parts and wood. Eric was keen to do this as he has already written a short book covering the history of these traditions and saw this as an opportunity to get at least some of it published, albeit in the form of liner notes. I was very excited by the idea as well, even by the part of simply riding a motorbike 6 hours into the jungle, but the project fell through when his grandfather decided that it would be inappropriate for their traditions to be recorded, let alone inscribed onto CDs to be distributed around the world. Can’t really complain about his reasoning- for them the magic they work with is entirely of and about the place where it occurs- but it is sad somehow that this music/tradition will disappear from history without leaving a tangible trace, and probably very soon.

And so my project and my time in Rurre’ was finally finished with the completion, the sequencing and laying out of the final album. It was ultimately decided that it would make sense to make it a download with the money going to the community trust rather than my trying to send through a box of CDs (it was suggested there was something like a 10% chance of such a box surviving its transit through the Bolivian postal service). And that’s where the album is now, floating around in the cloud and hopefully providing some small financial support to San Miguel del Bala- the village and its people. We’d been in the area for something like 5 weeks and it was the longest we spent in any one place in South America and the place where we got at least a small insight into what it would be like to live in such a community. It is also the place where I contracted the disease Leishmaniasis from the bite of a sandfly, but that is another story. I think it is the memories of this time that will last the longest from our year in South America

-Antony Milton

*Photo by drinkgoodwine77 @ Flickr

San Miguel del Bala release page
Antony Milton discography
Pseudoarcana website

Part II
The story behind the release San Miguel de Bala

We arrived at San Miguel del Bala, not much more than a bend of river bank in the jungle, and it was straight into the start of our 4 hours work unloading the various food supplies we had brought up river and carrying them up to the lodge.  It was really bloody hot, incredibly humid, but we were told that even the locals were a bit freaked out by the heat and that it wasn’t like this most of the time.

The lodge itself was a beautiful place- as one would expect! There were 2 large buildings down by the river, a dining hall and kitchen and a big mosquito meshed common house containing hammocks, a small library and a tiny museum. The main accommodation area- 7 self contained cabins- was an arduous climb up a stairway up the hill. We got to know this climb intimately over the next few weeks carrying guests luggage up to the cabins and undertaking our morning cleaning details.

The volunteers were housed in small cane huts near the kitchen along with the other local workers. This was perfectly adequate, ok beds and good mozzie nets. At night a torch was essential to get up to the cabin, no lights once the generator was shut off and the rough bush track prone to invasion by snakes, scorpions, and tarantulas. (Actually tarantulas were the most common of the exotic creatures we encountered, seemed to be everywhere). The most common actual hazard was a species of small wasp with a violent disposition. It would attack on sight, administering small but painful stings without any provocation whatsoever. I estimate I got at least 3 such stings every day I was there.

I was keen to get on with my project and so set about recording bird and insect sounds around the lodge. The insect sounds in particular were truly amazing. Very metallic, very loud and so like electronic sounds it was difficult to believe that they were natural. Julio, the manager at the lodge, seemed a little perplexed by my forays with microphone in hand and it took me maybe longer than it should have to realize that there had been no communication from the office about what I had come to do at all. I kept asking when the laptop I had been promised would arrive and he would just smile and shrug. If he had said ¨what laptop?¨ I may have clicked earlier that he was in the dark about the whole thing.

Anyway upshot was that for the first few days I didn’t really get much work done on my project at all but rather helped with the general volunteer work.
Needless to say the hours tended to exceed the agreed amount but as there wasn’t much else to do I didn’t really mind. Pretty much every morning we were there we would start out by cleaning around the cabins up on the hill. This meant going up there with a rake and a broom for 2 hours or more of sweeping up leaves. A pretty surreal scenario in the jungle! Needless to say this work was never completed because the place was subject to a constant rain, a veritable storm of falling leaves. Despite the resulting blisters I got a perverse pleasure from this work; I could wander off up some trail and work my way back listening to the forest. It was a meditative time. Besides this we did jobs like building stairways and new paths.

The lodge is a 15 minute walk upstream from the village/community of San Miguel del Bala itself. We had several excursions down here during our time off, a hair raising experience for me being a snake phobe walking through long grass. It was very interesting to visit because they still have no electricity (besides some solar powered lights) and people were still living much as they have for 100s of years. I got some great recordings down there, especially one day when they were using a huge wooden sugarcane press to extract sugar juice, a whole team of people driving it. Most of the people here survive by subsistence farming. Before the Lodge, and the National Park, the major external income came from logging. There were many banana and cacao groves (cocoa pod trees), and areas were being cleared for rice paddies.

On the 3rd or 4th day Eric showed up bringing with him the laptop and having a sit down meeting with me and Julio. Eric suggested that maybe he could organize a trip upriver to the Madidi National Park proper so that I could record some monkeys and other more exotic animals. Sounded great I said. He asked Julio to help me as he could, including running the generator, a horrible noisy little petrol affair, whenever I needed to recharge the laptop battery. Fantastic! I was in business. Straight away I set up in the common house and loaded on some software and started editing the insect and bird recordings from the last few days. Eric said he would be back ¨the day after tomorrow¨, or possibly the day after that and we could head up the river.
I think it was a week later that he showed up midmorning. (Everything happened at a tropical pace here… Manana manana manana..) He arrived and said ¨So, we can leave in 30 minutes?¨.

OK! That’s a change of pace! Better hurry. Sara and I rushed up to get a day pack together. Also coming with us was a new Irish volunteer named Peter who had shown up a day or 2 earlier. A great young guy his appearance on the scene represented a huge coincidence in that he was a biologist with a particular interest in bio-acoustics. Never before had the locals heard of these freakish westerners who wanted to record animal sounds and now they had 2 of them at once.
Down to the boat with our gear and Eric says: ¨That’s all you need for 3 days?¨ 3 days!!! I thought we were going for the afternoon… More panic as we rushed to try and get multi overnight kit together.

And so started an utterly unexpected adventure wherein we got what was essentially a free guided trip into the deep Amazon Jungle. We clambered aboard yet another log with a motor, this one even more basic than the 1st – the motor sounded like a tractor and pushed us upstream at a snails pace. Really this was an astounding situation to find myself in. Actually I felt a little like a fraud. I’m a guy who likes mixing together weird noises but here I was with an indigenous tribal community funding me to go for 3 days on a serious documentary expedition, with nothing more than a Zoom H4. Pretty damn lucky really.

The scenery was amazing, the river at times utterly terrifying. With us onboard were Eric and 2 other local men, one of the lodges main guides, and the boat driver. At one point we pulled over to shore where they jumped off and cut some long lengths of cane. I had no idea what these were for until we reached the rapids and they were put to use to try and stabilize the boat as we struggled upstream, coming close to capsizing more times than I care to remember. At one stage there was a cacophony of parrot squalls and Eric pointed out a clay cliff full of holes inhabited by raucous Toucans. I was too worried that we were likely about to have an accidental swim to get my recorder out of its dry bag.

We finally pulled into shore maybe 4 hours upstream and carried our gear up the beach.. Tents were set up and a basic camp kitchen put in order. Then we went fishing.

The rivers here in the Amazon absolutely teem with fish of all sorts, piranhas- even ‘giant’ piranhas. There are huge fish here, catfish heavier than can easily be lifted and fish is one of the main food stuffs in the region. It was to be our staple food, along with plantain and yucca, during our time in the bush.

Fishing technique number 1 :
>> Collect enormous grubs from grass by river bank.
>>Use grubs to catch abundant small sprats (approx time to catch small fish with grub = 5 seconds)
>>Use sprats as bait to catch bigger fish on handline.
This didn’t work so well for us.. It was drizzling when we tried and actually pretty cold and apparently these fish don’t feed during cold spells..

Fishing technique number 2:
>>Use drift net- hold one end and let the other be taken out by current.
>>Walk along the shore following your drift net for approximately 5 minutes.
>>Wade out and gather the net in.
This was REMARKABLY successful! On the first try we caught 4 huge fish, much bigger than any trout I’ve seen. We smoked these over the fire and besides being full of tiny bones they were delicious. I had bought a bottle of scotch with Peter and we shared this around the campfire before heading to our tent. It was cold and I was glad of the sleeping bags (something I couldn’t imagine using on other warmer nights), but at least the cold kept the mosquitoes at bay.

Next morning we were up and off bright and early in a continuing light drizzle, our walking fueled by frequent stops to add more coca leaves to the great green wad in our cheeks. (The locals are very addicted to chewing coca, a hunger suppressant as well as mild stimulant, and we were enthusiastic amateurs. The leaves are chewed with mineral lime and the astringent bark of a particular tree that aids in bringing out the effective alkaloids). I carried my recorder under my coat. We walked a big loop through the bush for several hours on hunting tracks. The terrain was remarkably flat overall with very few hills, there were regular swamps that teamed with a seemingly endless variety of bush turkeys, and other strange brown birds. The voices of these birds were incredibly varied, ranging from dried up vocal croaks to the ear piercing car alarm like sirens of the Horned Screamer.

But I had already been able to record many of these birds back at the lodge and village and it was the larger animals that we particularly wanted to see and hear. On that first loop we heard and saw some Brown Capuchin Monkeys. These made it onto the final album but are not so exciting sonically as some of the other monkeys.

Our next walk started with an hours ride upstream on our motorized log and I resolved to be more cautious during my evening washes after spotting a sizable crocodile on the river bank. Walking through the jungle with that Zen-like awareness of the hunter, careful step by careful step for hours on end was almost reward enough but we had more luck with animals on this circuit. Our first animal encounter was with a large group of maybe 30 wild pigs. Apparently these are the most dangerous animal in the region and have been known to kill and eat people. We were instructed to climb a tree as fast as possible if they attacked. They were truly terrifying, huge black beasts that seemed determined to stand their ground and made an enormous racket clacking their tusks at us. CLACK CLACK CLACK! Then they would all bolt howling through the undergrowth smashing small trees and whatever was in their path. I got some great recordings.

An hour or so later we came across a group of Spider Monkeys, but besides a quiet tuneful whimpering voice barely discernable above the rustling of foliage they had not such an interesting sound.

I was starting to feel pretty knackered by the time we turned around and headed back to the boat. I had something like 75 recordings already, mainly virtually identical recordings of birds, but a problem was on the horizon. Not having been aware that we would be out here for so long I hadn’t organized getting any more batteries for my recorder. I was using rechargables and had only one backup set. One of the guests at the lodge had kindly donated me what AAs they had with them but unfortunately these turned out to be rubbish. Another eg of the counterfeit goods that proliferate in the markets of South America. Branded as to be Sony alkaloid batteries it turned out that even simply booting up the recorder (turning it on) used nearly a third of their charge. Bugger!  I had very little recording time left available to me.

That night after dinner Eric and the other local guys headed off for some night fishing. With my batteries dying we would head back down to the lodge tomorrow and they wanted fish to take to their families. I decided to head off to try and record some frogs, something I considered very brave given my terror of snakes, creatures more active at night and especially fond of the swampy watery areas frequented by amphibians… I walked at a snails pace my torch studying every inch of ground for a goodly while before I took the next step. I got what I considered some good recordings and crept back to camp just as cautiously. (In fact in later review with Eric I discovered that what I had was a collection of recordings of remarkably exotic sounding crickets..)

The next morning I awoke in the pre-dawn to a distant roaring. I leapt up with the recorder just as Eric called out to me to get ready. Howler Monkeys! It was the most amazing sound, a deep throaty call and response between two groups at separate ends of the valley.  There was a wonderfully weird stereophonic ambience at this distance but the sound was too quiet to get a good read and so I set off running through the jungle- for 2 or 3 km with the guide Ronaldo leading the way. (Eric laughing stayed in bed).  It was the longest run I’ve had in years and I nearly asphyxiated in my desire to not pant breathlessly all over what turned out to be the most dramatic the recording of the trip. Positioning ourselves at the very base of the tree inhabited by one of the howlers I crouched there purple in the face recording a good 5 minutes or so of incredibly loud throaty roaring before the surprisingly small animal finished up for the day and curled up to go to sleep. Duty done, territory confirmed. It had sounded for all the world like death metal vocals –Backyard Burial live in the Amazon.

After breakfast we broke camp, loaded the boat and undertook the hairy trip back down the river. The trip down with the current was a fast one, with at least one very close call on a rapid. The jungle cliffs and rapids sped passed and we were back at the lodge by midday. Not exactly anticlimactic but a shock to be back there so soon. The sun came out for the first time since we’d left just as we arrived home.

Despite the instructions to the lodge people that I was there to work on a special project it was evident that this still wasn’t really understood. I was able to turn on the generator whenever I asked, but to be honest even I wasn’t very keen on this. It was a horrible smelly noisy thing that disrupted the ‘tranquillo’ nature of the place whenever it booted into life. Usually it was only on from sunset until around 8.30pm. Also it was obvious that Julio, the manager, thought that my time would be more practically used doing more mundane tasks such as building and leaf sweeping. I didn’t necessarily begrudge the requests that I work on these other jobs rather than on the editing etc I was trying to get done- I actually very much enjoy outdoor physical work- but I also knew that if I didn’t get cracking on putting this album together then we would be there forever.  And so I decided that it would be best to return to Rurrenabaque to work on the album there with relatively constant electricity and without the distractions of the lifestyle of the lodge.

…to be continued

-Antony Milton

San Miguel del Bala release page
Antony Milton discography
Pseudoarcana website

We were in La Paz in Bolivia, six months into a year long journey through South America. After a several weeks at high altitude and suffering from a run of vague travelers illnesses- flu’s and coughs as well as the usual catastrophic gut infections- we came to conclude that it was perhaps at least partly the frigid airless nature of the Altiplano that was largely to blame for our various infirmities. A decision was taken to bail for the lowlands.

Rurrenabaque is a small town in the Bolivian selva (jungle) that gained a certain notoriety when a group of Israeli adventurers came unstuck there. Several of them died and the bestseller “Heart of the Amazon” was written by one of the survivors. Somewhat perversely this resulted in the place becoming a major tourist attraction, especially for other Israeli tourists seeking perhaps to prove their survival skills superior to that of their countrymen. Many tour agencies were set up to take groups out into the jungle. A national park- Madidi- was formed and the numbers increased until today when “Rurre” is one of Bolivias top tourist attractions.

To be honest we had initially planned to skip the place. It seemed if anything overhyped and we had read many negative reports about the tours based from here. Amongst the most notorious were rumours that animals are frequently kept in cages close to tracks so that guides can miraculously spot and catch, say, an anaconda to present to their clients. But at the same time we were both to return to the Amazon basin having had an amazing time in Iquitos in Peru a couple of months earlier.

My partner Sara did some online research and posted a query on a couple of forums asking if anyone could recommend a good tour company that didn’t capture or mistreat animal. Within hours she had several responses and at least 2 of these were recommending a company called San Miguel del Bala, a Conservation International affiliated business owned and run as a community trust in an attempt to turn to tourism as an income stream now that no logging was allowed in the Madidi National Park. What’s more it turned out that it was possible to stay longer term as a volunteer. One still had to pay to do this- around NZ$14 per day- but this was still significantly cheaper than the US$70 it cost to visit as a guest. I read something on the website about them being particularly interested in special projects. Bingo! I wrote them about the possibility of making a CD documenting the sound environment, natural and musical, at and around the lodge and the National Park. I had a positive reply within hours and we started making our plans to get down there.

Rurre is 18 hours by bus from La Paz. A long long way and the road is notorious for its slippery muddy tracks cut into cliff faces and around gorges. Catastrophic boggings are common after rain and there are frequent reports of the trip taking 30 hours or more. The alternative however was a very expensive 20 minute flight. Sara and I decided to take the bus- I was actually pretty excited about the trip- the great thing about goat tracks around vertical drops is that they are typically attended by great views.  I spent our last day in La Paz scouring the pirate software stalls for music programs, editing and multitrack software. Needless to say nearly every program you could imagine was available for next to nothing. Then it was off to the chemist to stock up on antibiotics in case of tropical bugs, and valium to knock ourselves out for the overnight sections of the upcoming bus trials.

The bus itself departed La Paz at least an hour and a half later than scheduled (in part because some family was moving house and all their lounge furniture and fridge freezers etc had somehow to be slotted into the hold under the bus) and I was pretty sad to leave knowing that this would be our last visit for this journey at least. It seemed a very livable city and I had many fantasies of what I could do there living in an apartment. All those markets full to brimming with useful tools and materials. If it weren’t for the notoriously ineffective, and perhaps even downright corrupt, postal service it would be a great place from which to run a record label.

We seem to have had pretty crap luck when it comes to windows on buses. For some reason the locals seem to have an aversion to fresh air on public transport and prefer to ride their journeys out in a hot humid fetid funk. We would occasionally manage to sneakily open a neighbours window a crack or more but this was always discovered within minutes and the offending breeze cut off. So it was for at least the first few hours of this journey. We set off over a high snowy mountain pass before dropping down down down through exquisite scenery- massive craggy mountain faces awash with spectacular waterfalls- 2 hours or so down and into the beginnings of the tropics and the jungle. The heat and general mugginess increased so that some windows were finally opened, if only a centimeter or so.

For all the austere breathless beauty of the highlands there’s something about these tropical lowlands that I preferred. It’s hard to rush in this kind of heat and things are instantly more laid back. Everyone gets around in shorts, singlet and flipflops. No suits down here. The bus rattled along for hours through lush jungle occasionally being subsumed in enormous clouds of dust from vehicles coming the other way- always a hair-raising experience, with the buses carriage frequently overhanging the edge of a cliff. This only got worse at night when the drivers assistant would disembark and attempt to negotiate our precarious mutual passage by feeble torchlight. We passed tiny villages in the bush, the buildings of thatched palm fronds. We had a dinner of bbq’d steak and beer in a small town. Then the lights off, we took our valium tablets and zoned out gaga to the Beatles ‘White Album’ , Brian Eno and old Pink Floyd bootlegs fresh from the pirate stalls of the capital.

As mentioned getting bogged is one of the hazards of a trip like this and I awoke in the dark to find that all the noise and action was in attempt to free us from a small quagmire. Turned out that it was 5.30am and that we were on the very outskirts of Rurrenabaque. The drugs had worked! Half an hour later, in the rosy dawn, we retrieved our dusty packs from the hold and gave ourselves entirely to a tout who was offering a room in a riverside hotel for an ok price. He offered to drive us down on the back of his 125cc motorbike (not many cars here- most of the taxis are motorbikes!) but I had no idea how this was even remotely feasible with our packs and bags so we walked behind him as he putted along down to the river and our home for the night. A nice place, free bananas, parrots in the trees, hammocks on the shady deck, and the big brown Rio Beni rolling sluggishly passed. We took to our room and promptly fell fast asleep until early afternoon.

The town of Rurre is a collection of dirt and cement roads lined with cheap chicken restaurants (wooden benches and plastic flowers) , a phenomenal array of 2nd hand clothing stalls festooned with offcasts that originated in small USA towns, and the typical general stores and electro gadget shops. There was one street dominated by over priced tourist restaurants and bars with signs in both bad English and what I assume was equally bad Hebrew. There were many tour agencies, but with the season winding down only a handful of actual tourists. We found the offices of San Miguel del Bala and introduced ourselves to Eric, the guy with whom we had been corresponding about our volunteer work.

We went over the volunteer agreements, signing a 7 day contract (the minimum- a trial period). I was left somewhat unsure that they knew what the fuck I was on about with my project, but they seemed keen to encourage me all the same.  They promised me the use of a laptop and I agreed that I would stay until I had a viable and acceptable album of environmental recordings finished for them. The deal was that we would work a minimum of 4 hours a day in return for the reduced rate food and accommodation at the lodge. We signed an acknowledgement that San Miguel was in no way responsible for injuries occurring as a result of falls nor snake or scorpion bite. He told us to be back at the office at 8am the next morning so that we could catch the boat up river.

Loading our gear on board I was glad of my dry bag (a truly waterproof rubber bag containing my zoom recorder and other electronics). The boat was not much more than a dug out log with an outboard motor at the back. Pretty fucking cool but there seemed a very real possibility of an unexpected swim. We had thought Eric was going to join us but as we boarded he waved goodbye and the boat set off against the current. Operating like a taxi it called in, picked up and dropped off people as we went. 45 minutes on a surging hot chocolate coloured tumult with stunning rocky cliffs and green jungle lining the banks. At one point we stopped to watch a large weasel like creature swimming across to toward the other bank.

…to be continued

-Antony Milton

San Miguel del Bala release page
Antony Milton discography
Pseudoarcana website

Travelling over water is the only way to reach San Miguel del Bala, so fittingly a boat’s engine is the first sound to convey us deep into the green rainforest of Bolivia. An area of great natural biodiversity and home to the indigenous Tacana people.

Formally this work is organised into discreet tracks, each one portraying a different aspect of the rain forest expedition. One for example describes village life on the banks of the Beni River. Human activity, movement and work, chatter and music. All taking place, one imagines, in a small clearing deep within mile after square mile of unceasing foliage. Man and nature put in perspective.

Milton wrote a blog during his South American travels which he has condensed into an essay. When read alongside these recordings it adds a sense of physicality to the work. The insect bites, the lack of AA batteries for the Zoom H4 and the difficulty in obtaining a laptop, and those are just some of the non-life threatening episodes.

The music of the Tacana people is a frantic snare drum beat overlayed by wooden flute playing. The snare, or caja as it is known, creates a rhythm only one step away from a shamanistic ritual. The dances and the music are clearly a connection to the past for a culture in danger of being obliterated by the encroaching modern world.

Insects produce the most disconcertingly alien sounds here. Regularly pulsing sine waves and chirrups that come from unseen sources. As Milton points out, their output often seem to be akin to electronic music. At dusk they weave a curtain of sound to usher in the darkness, dense and complex, made by an orchestra of unseen participants. It is as if the air becomes thick with vibration.

One startling piece of recording reveals the chilling, guttural voices of Howler Monkeys in full song. They sound for all the world like death metal vocalists. Malevolent demons living in the trees with cries dredged up from the depths of hell.

The recording ends as it began, a boat engine signalling a journey back to civilisation. The volume fades and once again a sound window into another world closes. We’ve just spent a cinematic 35 minutes in the Madidi National Park, Bolivia. Hardly any time at all, and yet I’m checking the house for tarantulas.

Milton’s San Miguel del Bala portrays the rain forest in a way that thankfully transcends documentary. It is a far more layered and personal piece. Often utilising music but never overpoweringly, the human element is not erased. The Tacana people live here permanently, and their existence is as much a part of this biosphere as the river or the trees.

After returning to New Zealand, Milton found that he had contracted Leishmaniasis, an infection resulting in skin sores passed on by the bite of a female sand fly. I hope he considers it was worth it, because San Miguel del Bala is a beautifully formed testament to sound exploration and composition.

This is the link to the chronicles behind this journey by Antony Milton

-Chris Whitehead

Antony Milton discography
San Miguel del Bala release page
Pseudoarcana website

Most often, we have a natural curiosity for the things remaining in shadowy light or invisible – probably because it links us to the fundamental Mystery of our lives…

On “Drenaje Subterráneo”, veteran soundshaper Pablo Reche & ultra sensitive field recordist Juan José Calarco unite their forces to present an astounding travelogue along the most obscure part of a city : it’s net of sewers and buried waterways – a seething underworld in itself.

Being physically almost inaccessible increases the feat of the recording situation, but the most challenging is the displacement of perception on a level we aren’t used to.

The sleeve notes don’t offer any clue or relevant precisions about the work method, so we can only have a guess at how the core of the project articulated itself…one may suppose some recording device/mics have been strategically positioned in the pipes to capture the subtle shades of the liquid subcurrents, each jolt of the flow, its furtivity, and also the fluctuating volumes of air pressure…

Around 8:45 mins is a highly contrasting passage on the forefront, causing a rather brutal disruption, like receiving a cascade in full face, but strangely enough it doesn’t cut the wings of our reverie…shortly after this abrasive moment, the contemplative course of our observation continues.

There might be some extraneous elements involved, other than the pipe sounds, but they are so well amalgamated to the main substance that they only seem to exist to underline further more the characteristics of the place…

Everything contributes to create a fictional space proper to everyone and extremely fertile in terms of sensations.

No blatant dark connotations, but fine resonances, faint echoes, buzzing flies, loud air, a high degree of humidity, an expanding indefinable emanation in suspension.

This is incredibly dense & altogether focused for a single EP, and again a master work from Juan José Calarco, doubled here by Pablo Reche’s idiosyncratic talent…not far in terms of meaning & impact from the gripping Tarab piece on a split 3”CDR with Eric La Casa for Compost & Height…

A long coiled descent plenty of infinitesimal details, captivating from start to end, till the final fading gurgle..

-Daniel Crokaert

Pablo Reche website
Juan José Calarco website
Siridisc website 

Most of the works reviewed on The Field Reporter are either phonographic works­ based on incidental sounds, phonographic
works based on the sounds of nature, works with a musique concrete approach and electroacoustic compositions.

“Voodoo ceremony in Haiti” is a release like it hasn’t been reviewed on The Field Reporter before and I think this is important: to understand that phonography is not only a tool to create music and art, but also to document our experiences in the more strict sense of the word.

Maurice Bitter is a writer and recordist with an extensive bibliography and discography; his sound work is focused on social and cultural aspects of different groups around the world. ”Voodoo ceremony in Haiti” uses recordings captured in the island La tortue in Haiti during actual voodoo ceremonies.

Maurice Bitter and his social and anthropological studies found in sound a great medium to imprint all the aspects related to this cultures through their ceremonies and other aspects of their life. What is very interesting here is that the sensible experience that the listener has though the recordings of the Voodoo ceremony is probably more vivid and real, than any filming or writing about it. Sound seems to connect with our emotions in a way that only sound can. Images and text don’t seem to have the physical character that music has although the works of artists like Richard Garet successfully explores the possibility of images (with the help of sound) to have strong physical repercussions in the spectator.

“Voodoo ceremony in Haiti” is not a distant alien view to this ceremony, but it is the ceremony itself. The listener is in a similar position to the participants as music, one of the key elements emotional in these ceremonies, is there. The anthropological documentation acquire a complete new sense when sound recordings are made, it becomes vital and vivid, the experience is interior and physical. Beyond any cultural and social aspects, this is music expected and performed to induce people to deep emotional states in order to face and get in touch with metaphysical forces. This is music purposed to affect the body through the physical act of dance, leading the consciousness to states beyond any reason and comprehension.

I hope one day I can dance to this record like I did when I was a little kid and my dad brought it home from the record store and played it on the turntable; actually this is the first record I have memory of and this strong first experience with music (and phonography) is something I will remember for the rest of my life.

In the meantime I am glad to pay a more than well deserved tribute to phonographist Maurice Bitter and his extensive discography that hopefully encourage phonographists and sound artists in general to have a broader understanding of the implications and possibilities of  recording sounds.

- uncredited writer

Maurice Bitter discography
Olympic discography 

Taî-pak thiaⁿ saⁿ piàn. YANNICK DAUBY
(Kalerne 2011)

French composer and theorist Michael Chion has wrote extensive lines about the relation between sound and film in books such as “Film, a Sound Art” and “Audio Vision”.

On “Audio vision” Chion writes about the differences between the visual and acoustic perception, and about how our hearing processes information faster than our sight. He argues that this might has to do with the fact that sound is the medium we use to communicate through verbal language. In the other hand sight is more explorative -like in a scanning process- and this might be the reason why the processing of visual impulses is slower in opposition to the process of hearing which works more like a constant stream of information.

Musique concrete like probably no other form of music and sound art explores the deep and interesting relation between film and sound. The edition of sounds, the possibility of juxtapose sounds and create transitions between them are actions with perceptual consequences in our conscience.

“Taî-pak thiaⁿ saⁿ piàn” is one of the most cinematographic works I remember hearing in a while, as it does a very strong exploration and exploitation of the sound imaginary creating this stream of beautiful, impacting and overwhelming images that we acquire through our ears. The sounds used by Yannick Dauby throughout this release range from musical performances, recordings of voices and incidental sounds. Three key elements of cinema that help adding to this work a very strong visual and narrative character.

The first piece “Nous, les défunts” (Us, the defunct) is mostly built with sounds of fireworks, insects and singing and instrumented music that throughout the piece are presented separately but that at the end are juxtaposed to create this sublime overwhelming experience of strong emotionality and beautiful imaginary.

“Taipei 2030″, the second piece, is more environmental through the beginning while through the middle is more about motion and movement: one could guess that here some of the recordings were captured inside moving vehicles and others taken  from vehicles passing by. When edited they create a illusion of movement vividly depicted . The sound of cicadas persist from piece number one, becoming the unification element though the release. Cicadas means summertime, means high temperatures and this is something that is immanent to this work. The heat.

“Ketagalan” is a piece that again explores transportation but in a complete different way. The subway seems to be the element of cohesion although the layering and juxtaposing of sounds is the most valuable element. The social and cultural content found in the metro through the different experiences and background of the riders help the composer to create this beautiful and dreamlike experience. The listener have the chance to travel in the subway and access a variety of sound images in a way the subway becomes not only a medium of transportation but a medium for a more cultural, social and personal exploration.

In addition to being a musique concrete composition, “Taî-pak thiaⁿ saⁿ piàn” is an acoustic film, a series of images and scenarios with a very strong emotional content where a narrative is established through
the exploration of the casual and reduced hearing.

This is a very successful work that opens the door to phenomenological and artistic reflections on the audio visual field and in particular on the relation between cinema and sound art / music; “Taî-pak thiaⁿ saⁿ piàn” rewards the listener with a very strong perceptual experience into a universe of images of extreme beauty and profound meaning.

-Alan Smithee

Yannick Dauby wesbite
Kalerne website 

“If only, then, I had been more living out of the present–such a beautiful word…present. The sense of it being, now to me, more beautiful than ‘to look forward.”
- Stan Brakhage

For Slavek Kwi sound is clay, living, breathing, forming and defroming clay. His formal work is physical, tactile, immersive and most important changing: “Breaking ice” is about sound expressed as matter, shape and time and the formal considerations the composer has through them.

The work of Slavek Kwi, and “Breaking ice” in particular, have this approach where you sense matter, form and motion but most important  you sense the will and purpose behind the incidental: you sense time expressed through things, through invisible objects whose form and matter are subdued by some force beyond reason, the force of truth.

But the work of Slavek Kwi is also about something else, it’s about time and narrative; sequences of events that occur and that we order and link through time as they appear to us.

From a scientific perspective it could be said in a speculative effort that one’s brain interprets external impulses and converts / performs them into this perceptual universe that occurs in one’ conscience.

From an artistic perspective the musique concrete composer performs his interpretations of the external impulses to the listener: the musique concrete composer mimics the process of experience, he mimics the brain and its interpretative character…but, do we need a medium between what goes on out there and what goes on inside us? We need it as much as we need to dream and imagine. Musique concrete reveals a healthy and insightful break from “reality”, a break from our perception, from ourselves. A way to scape and experience beyond our experience, a way to become universal. A way for being listened when we are are listening, a way to reach outside oneself into the “else”, into the universe that reaches inside us.

And this exactly what Slavek Kwi’s work does so effectively, it affects our perception of things, making us doubt about the veracity of our own perception and understanding one’s experience as partial, finite limited and limiting in comparison to the eternal and simultaneous experience of a potential self aware cosmos.

Little else can be said other than the work of Slavek Kwi extends new horizons and raises trascendental questions about the perceptual possibilities of phonographic based composition in terms of dealing with the sculptural, narrative and phenomenological aspects of sound based sound art.

-John McEnroe

Slavek Kwi website
Tentacles Of Perception discography

What does a river mean?

In some cases it means an obstacle, a barrier that needs to be bridged. For wildlife it means a range of habitats, both beneath the water and along the banks. A river geographically connects the towns and villages along its course. Rivers are often pressed into service as metaphors for life. They begin as unruly infants, high up in the hills, full of energy and exhuberance. Over time and distance they become languid and peaceful before finally opening out into the unforgiving sea.

Rivers have a multitude of meanings and can be read in many ways. Craig Vear’s sound poem Esk is a portrait of a 28 mile long English river flowing from its birthplace on the hills at Westerdale, through the North Yorkshire Moors National Park, and into the North Sea at the town of Whitby. Vear has produced a piece of work that is rich in detail and yet not cluttered or contrived. As with any portrait, a true appreciation of character emerges the longer and deeper you look.

Curiously Vear collected the raw materials for Esk by beginning at the outer harbour wall at Whitby, then moving upriver towards the source. After acquiring what must have been hours of recordings, the piece was then edited and composed in the order of the Esk’s actual flow. In other words in the opposite direction to which it was recorded. In a sense it is moving backwards in time as it gets closer to the sea. The seasons flow in reverse, proving that sound art can render time plastic.

Recording the flow of water in all its various forms is one thing, but what really defines a river is its banks. They channel it and give it form. The geographical nature of the countryside it passes through and the life around it imbue a unique personality. At various points along the route we hear the engines of vehicles crossing bridges spanning the water, and occasionally human voices. This work shouldn’t be taken as an idealised, pastoral portrait. It is grounded in reality and there are some surprisingly jarring sound events. Rough edges have not been smoothed off.

At several points we are plunged beneath the surface into the world of crayfish, dragonfly nymphs and trout. Hydrophone recordings always feel like eavesdropping on sounds that we as air-listeners weren’t designed to hear. They always take us into an unknowable place. We can picture the silver surface of the water undulating above us and the stone strewn bed beneath us.

There are many different facets to Esk, and it moves quickly between environments. On the moors insects buzz, in the trees birds call and in the fields cattle low balefully. We move on towards the sea, the natural direction of flow giving this work its linearity and purpose. The final sounds are deep water surges showing that the journey is complete and the Esk has been reclaimed by the sea.

As with all 3Leaves releases, Esk comes exquisitely packaged in a postcard sized cover depicting the river in winter. Snowblown trees and white banks speak equally of picturesque stillness and the harshness of nature. A fitting image.

What does a river mean?

According to Heraclitus it means change. In his words; ‘You can never step into the same river; for new waters are always flowing on to you’. Similarly, every time you listen to this piece by Craig Vear, expect something different being carried on the current.

- Chris Whitehead

Craig Vear website
3Leaves wesbite 

One leaf lets go, and  then another takes the wind.
- Ransetsu

The 17th century Japanese haiku poet Ransetsu was renowned for his compassion and for his poetical austerity. The four works in this series certainly reflect Ransetsu’s austerity, manifesting a conceptual approach in the reduced resources and in the presentation of various environmental and instrumental sounds ’as such’.

tanabe 6 offers us field recordings from the coast of Tanabe in Japan. The piece is a meditation on the envelope of waves, the waves filtered in quite a unique way, so that a hint of resonance reveals itself at the amplitude peaks, revealing a sophisticated almost electronic sounding timbre superimposed on a background seascape. Small background sounds including possible human movement keep the ears alert. Despite the apparent austerity of the work, it merits repeat listening simply because of an element of persistence in its unique approach to field recordings, in what it leaves out and in its refusal to interfere to the point of contrivance.

9425 – 2/mw is described as a medium wave radio segment. The first three minutes or so give us the almost uniform static of a slowly modulating radio sound, with interest in the increased iterations, then a shade of contrast in the odd blip. From 3:00 to 5.30 the starkness is broken by the odd static burst, a good blast of ‘elektronische’. From 5:40 it sounds like you’ve crawled into the back of a jumbo jet engine. Musically we’re listening to fairly uniform timbres, mid/low and broadband, a uniform density, with some interest in the tremolo. The sudden end left my ears hissing, as if I had my own internal radio set.

3 morning is a simple harmonium piece. A single tone, somewhere around the ‘b flat’ below middle ‘c’, allows us to contemplate the richness of reeds, their overtones and the movement of the bellow. There is a very gradual crescendo over 8’30” but overall the piece is so uniform that the incidental sounds come to be of interest.
tanabe 7 offers us more field recordings. The sounds of this seascape are more burbly this time, the wave envelope sounds less processed. In the troughs all sorts of interesting little activities and background sounds catch the ear, including what sounds like the movements of the artist.

Apart from the simplicity and innocent refreshing pleasure of listening to a good recording of waves on the shore, the Tanabe pieces will make field recordists reflect on their own practice and stop worrying too much about over-complicating things. Less can indeed be more.

Recorded in Tanabe, Japan and Brooklyn, New York between 2005 and 2011.

Released on con-v as a C40 cassette, limited to 65 copies.

-Caity Kerr

Ben Owen website
CON-V website