The Chill Out Tent

To celebrate the publication of Ben Murphy’s new book Ears to the Ground, which promises “adventures in electronic music and field recording”, here we list some of our favourite releases that combine the organic with the electronic.

The fusion of field recording and electronic music is nothing new. You can swap the word ‘field recording’ for ‘sampling’ (even if you did not make the field recording, somebody did) and that fusion goes way back to the days of Stockhausen and other musique concrete pioneers. While the likes of Brian Eno and Ariel Kalma used these techniques fruitfully in the 1970s and 80s, a new generation of electronic musicians are using found sound to bring a warmth and sense of organic realness to their recordings.

The current vogue for using field recording stretches beyond birdsong, traffic noise and sampled voices, and into a a deep fusion or organic instruments, electronics, voice, and recording. This is also reflected in music that easily blends genres – most noticeably in jazz and folk, where “real” musicians are using electronic techniques not just to embellish their sound but as an essential instrument, as important as the sax or guitar.

What results is often an ambient-jazz or ambient-folk hybrid that crosses far more boundaries than those restrictive made-up genres suggest. If the historical driver of much electronic music has been futurist with a desire for progress and break new ground, the current crop often dig further into the past, into their roots and other cultures’ roots, to claim new musical terrain.

The use of field recordings brings an earthy quality, a realness, and often a homeliness that puts the listener at ease (or sometimes, unease) and leaves us more able to sink into a warm (or sometimes, cold) landscape of sound.  

Field Works – Maples, Ash, and Oaks – Cedar instrumentals

Field Works’ main man Stuart Hyatt is a latter day pioneer of this whole organic-electric thing. On numerous releases dating back to 2018’s Born in the Ear, Hyatt brings together a diverse range of artists (Juana Molina, Eluvium, Loscil, HC McEntire, Masayoshi Fujita and many many more) to soundtrack a different place that he has chosen to focus on – a road, an underground river, a forest or town. 

The Field Works Listener’s Guide – Metaphonics was compiled to guide you through several of these journeys and is a fabulous document of Hyatt’s adventures in sound. There is a high concept to Hyatt’s art but the results can be best enjoyed when the head is disengaged and the beauty pulls on our heartstrings. Prime example being the lush Maples, Ash, and Oaks, which remixes previous release Cedars to create the sound of the American woods in immersive detail. 

It is as alluring as anything you might hear on Erased Tapes and brings together Hyatt’s found sound with his collaborators’ music completely seamlessly.

Simon Fisher Turner – The Epic of Everest

Soundtracks are a natural home for field recordings and none do it better or more seamlessly than Simon Fisher Turner’s works. This journey through the Himalayas can be a profound trip – with or without the awe-inspiring visuals.

Jeremiah Chiu and Sofia Horner – Recordings from the Åland Islands

After visiting the Aland Islands (in the Baltic Sea) in 2017, Chiu and Honer returned in 2019 to perform a concert in a 14th century medieval church. The concert was recorded and became source material – along with improvisations on viola and electronics, pipe organ, pump organ, piano, synthesizers, field recordings and voice memos, all captured across both their trips at various locations on the archipelago – from which they meticulously crafted a post-script in the form of ‘Recordings from the Åland Islands’.

Fuubuutsushi – Shiki

Possibly the prime example of jazzers doing this thing. Shiki brings together four albums, reflecting fours seasons, which Fuubuutsushi created between 2020 and 2021. 

The fusion of genres here is reflected by the long-distance collaboration that saw violinist Chris Jusell, guitarist Chaz Prymek, percussionist and keyboardist Matthew Sage, and woodwind player Patrick Shiroshi share field recordings and instrument recordings across continents. It is almost unbelievable that such an organic sound could come from four musicians that are not sitting in the same room. A sign of our musically (and technologically) fertile times.

Morgan Szymanski and Tommy Perman – Music for the Moon and the Trees

The Blackford Hill label specializes in this sort of thing: “Our releases encompass electronica, field recordings, modern classical, spoken word and jazz – all connected to or inspired by a sense of place, created in a variety of audio and print formats.”

If you like this sort of thing (and let’s presume you do if you’ve read this far), almost all of its releases are worth a listen.

Here label co-founder Perman does just what the album title suggests, while bringing an intriguing sense of rhythm that reminds this listener a bit of Tom Waits’ pots and pans percussion.

Ultramarine – Send and Return

Ultramarine have been doing this since 1990s classics such as United Kingdoms and Every Man and Woman is a Star. They found the ideal home in Blackford Hill when returning from a period in the relative wilderness. While those 90s albums often displayed a folky back-to-the-land aesthetic, here the jazz influence is apparent.

Sofie Birch – Holotropica

This is a quite extraordinary album where saxophone, harp, flute, drums and ambient washes create the imaginary world of Holotropica – “a point behind closed eyes… wherefrom everything can be invoked from the ether… where roots twist around organs and slowly grow and tangle up along the spine in shades of green, striking buds in the light of the stars…”

Carmen Villain – Only Love From Now On

Norwegian-Mexican musician Carmen Villain is less overtly jazz-influenced than some of the records listed here but the trumpets and flutes certainly bring that vibe. We hear an ambient odyssey through the rainforest. It is a similar soundworld to Birch’s, a world where the imagination knows no bounds.

Various Artists – A Guide to the Birdsong of Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean

Speaking of the rainforest, all of the proceeds of this delightful compilation are donated to Birds Caribbean, La Asociación Ornitológica de Costa Rica and Fundacion TXORI in Mexico. 

A diverse range of artists and styles from Belize’s rootsy Garifuna Collective to Jamaica’s alt-dancehall Equinoxx crew take inspiration and sound from vulnerable bird species like the Momoto Carenado (Nicaragua), Ferminia (Cuba) and the Jamaican Blackbird (Jamaica). 

Soundwalk Collective & Patti Smith – Mummer Love/The Peyote Dance

Yes, that Patti Smith. Here she incants halucinogenic poetry over the Soundwalk Collective’s themed journeys in sound. There are three such jaunts and a collection of remixes across The Perfect Vision series. Mummer Love explores sufism, while The Peyote Dance unleashes the magic of the Mexican desert (possibly).

Loris S. Sarid – Music for Tomato Plants

Drip, drop ambience that takes inspiration from Japan’s Kankyo Ongaku environmental music of the 1980s with similarly healing properties.

Taro Nohara – Poly-Time Soundscapes

Speaking of Japanese environmental music, Taro Nohara’s modern take on the genre takes us on a two-part adventure of contemplative peace, a mind-soothing walk through time (or memories) and the beautiful mysteries of luscious forests. 

Daniel Bachman – Axacan

Daniel Bachman is an extraordinary guitarist from the American Primitive tradition made famous by John Fahey. His trance-inducing sets take inspiration and bare close relation to Indian ragas. In recent years Bachman has used field recordings to quite devastating effect as he reflects on climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, the lingering effects of colonialism and genocide. Yeah, heavy stuff. This is not easy listening. It is a masterpiece.

Michael Scott Dawson – Music for Listening

Another American guitarist but this time adhering much tighter to the Chill Out Tent’s usual aesthetic. Gentle slide guitar, piano and birdsong create a rural idyll of pasture and farmland straight out of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

Celestial – I had Too Much To Dream Last Night

More guitars but very subtly so, in a Vini Reilly manner with delicate brushes of Ry Cooder also evident. This is not so heavy on the field recordings but is a prime example of the ambient-folk fusion, this time coming out of Manchester rather than the Mid West. The press blurb calls it ‘soft touch balearic blues’, which is about right.

Kinbrae – Burl of Unmap

More folk-not-folk ambience, this time from Scotland. ‘Birl of Unmap’ is an attempt to unravel the dynamic layers that make Fife an area of both artistic and physical interest, as well as interpreting something of the perceived language of the place. Poetic and dramatic.

Ballakê Sissoko and Vincent Segal – Musique de Nuit

Recorded on Sissoko’s roof in Bamako, the field recordings on this piece are incidental but essential. Close your eyes and imagine yourself sitting in a deckchair on that rooftop, as Sissoko’s kora and Segal’s cello weave a beautiful tapestry that floats across the Malian night.

Jon Hopkins – Music for Psychedelic Therapy

Featuring sounds recorded in Ecuadorian caves (and elsewhere), this is music designed to accompany natural psychedelics. There is no dissonance here. This is soulful ambience specifically created to assist healing therapy. It’s tear-inducingly beautiful.

Philip Jeck & Chris Watson – Oxmardyke

No article on field recording would be complete without the presence of Chris Watson, who left Cabaret Voltaire to follow his passion for recording sound – just about everywhere. His ‘El Tren Fantasma’ album is semi-legendary and you will hear his work all over the BBC.

This 2023 collaboration with the late Philip Jeck is sometimes terrifying and sometimes beautiful. It brings together so many of the themes mentioned above – from mindscapes to landscapes, from the natural to the man-made – that it seemed like the most appropriate endpoint.