Radio Aporee

Berlin based german artist, Udo Noll has developped a great project, Radio Aporee, which is opened and could interest any people into mental wanderings and sonic explorations. The idea is simple and consist in taking part in a sort of sounds map, with field recordings, easily captured with a phone, or simply uploaded from a sound file. From everywhere in the world, you can add field recordings, and localise the source on a googlemap, with a red circle. The description of this project is available on Radio Aporee website. This project is unlimited and open to everyone who wants to take part in.
Just try to navigate on the map, above New York, and fall on a base-ball field, then after a click on the place, you discover that few minutes of a field recording of a base-ball match can be listened to... Go above Berlin, to Sanderstrasse 13, just listen to the sounds remains of a home-party during a night of last september...

Music of the Woods Afterthought | Birdsong

After listening to the MP3 and hearing the birds above the music and trees I remembered David Rothenburg's book 'Why Birds Sing'. Rothenburg began playing music 'live' with birds in 2000, as you can imagine this route has led him into some remarkable places, atmospheres and experiences. The extract below is more food for thought concerning our role within nature and the landscape - An area of discussion that has transpired over the last few of posts...

'Bird songs are a genuine challenge to the conceit that humanity is needed to find beauty in the natural world. Whatever processes of evolution have led to their flourishing, no rigorous natural logic explains why they are so multifarious and complex. With deft listening, we can abandon our prejudices to find new expanses of music beyond familiar constraints. Their music is essential not arbitrary; playful but purposeful; repetitive, not boring. It possesses the necessity to which human art aspires'.

(From David Rothenburg's Why Birds Sing)

in the earth

Maps.01 | Speaking in trees

‘Though the quiet deep of solitude reigned in that vast and nearly boundless forest, nature was speaking with her thousand tongues, in the eloquent language of night in a wilderness. The air sighed through ten thousand trees…’
James Fenimore Cooper.



Today’s society is a heavily noise polluted environment where sanctuary and stillness is a rarity. The need for silent retreat however is still present and has been since past times when individuals would retire to sanctuaries of silence for re-composure of the mind and spirit. Today we venture into our surroundings and inevitably into nature to find this quilt of bliss and a re connection from what we have been removed so far from – a sense of place.

These woods are full of silence but where Cage's silence was filled with his nervous system and blood circulation, here it is filled with the gentle creaking of entangled bark and the wind that wraps itself around this timberous world. Sitting in the middle of these trees, with dappled light somersaulting dust through the air I realise my hearing is becoming more acute, more alert to the most tiny of noises, the most secrete of sounds. Within these woods and these splintering trees the main protagonist is in fact the wind.

Wind, by its very nature is silent unless objects are put in its way, in this sense the trees become the players, orchestrated by the wind, tuned by the seasons. It seems that trees have voices with the passing of a breeze, some moan, some stretch others become tempestuous knots.

This sanctuary is becoming rare, this place that we are tied and bound to, this earth that we will all one day return to. These trees that provide such a humbling sense of place, a sense of wonder and of sanctuary, if you listen closely you’ll hear them speaking...

Speaking Trees MP3

Q. What is your audio sanctuary? Where do you go to listen? What are your thoughts & memories of such places? Have we become so visually biased that we have forgotten our ears?

leaving a mark..