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An unforeseen delay to my field recording plans!

This week I was planning on restarting my field recording but unfortunately I had an accident! I slipped down some stairs and hit my foot quite badly on the wall, then I got up, promptly fainted, and fell down some more stairs! Miraculously, I’m relatively unscathed, but definitely won’t be doing any significant walking for a while, so the field recording is off the table for a few more weeks! The last time I fainted due to “trauma” was in secondary school, metalwork, an incident with a lathe, but luckily I wasn’t halfway up the stairs that time! Phew!

I’ve been making field recordings for a number of years now, mainly when I visit the UK coast, on holidays. I have a ritual of going out very early in the mornings, walking and recording. It’s a beautiful time, in beautiful places, and I really cherish the memories of those moments!

I’ve worked with the resulting recordings in a couple of different ways. Initially, I was interested in incorporating the recordings directly into my music. I was working fully in Ableton Live at the time and I cleaned up the recordings into “tracks” which I would then start to layer instrumentation on top of slowly, so the timings and harmonies were somehow “in tune” with the recordings. The first result of that process was my album Filey in 2020. I later re-released some of those recordings without music as part of my 2023 album Recordings of the Sea.

I tried the same process again with a collection of recordings I’d made in Pembrokeshire in 2022, but it didn’t work for me that time. By that point I’d started ”listening” more and didn’t feel that using the field recordings as an element of my music was the way to go, they were interesting in their own right! So I decided to release them as a collection to document the place and the experience of spending time listening and recording there — Flight Paths: Field Recordings From Gupton Farm, Pembrokeshire, Summer 2022.

I’ve also got a few field recordings up on Substack in the Field Notes section of the site. It was an experiment with the built-in podcast functionality. I probably won’t continue it further as I prefer the “non-podcast” layout and Spotify often disallowed the posts as they seem to have an issue with most “noise” and field recordings, I’m not sure why, something to do with people uploading really long white noise tracks maybe? I really don’t want my field recordings on Spotify anyway!

I have made many other recordings over the last few years but nothing has come together as a collection in the same way that Flight Paths did.

So I was planning to start recording more again before my stairs incident! Perhaps strangely, I haven’t recorded that much in my local area. I live just down the road from the Peak District National Park, a beautiful part of the world, and it isn’t too hard to find some interesting sounds round and about!

To tide us over here is a recording I made in Westward Ho! Cornwall in 2023. I’m walking along the stunning natural Pebble Ridge. It’s a very meditative listen (and also walk) and I was quite pleased that I’d managed to capture it in this way. Hopefully I’ll be back to full walking health soon enough! Watch out for stairs, they’re dangerous!

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If you’d like to follow my sound recording journey in more detail going right back to art college in the 90s and talking about the equipment and experiences I’ve had over the years, I made a video all about it last year: