When nature and music combine.

Welcome

The recording studio is a wonderful, magical place, isn't it?

It allows artists to gift us their music. It carries their vision to us. But sometimes it can also leave something behind: the spontaneity, the imperfections, and the feeling of music existing in a real place.

I started thinking about this during a recent family hike, and the memory got me exploring albums recorded elsewhere than a recording studio. That's what you'll read about in the main feature.

Aside from that, I've covered two amazing modern jazz records I came across recently, along with the usual dose of recommendations and finds.

I hope you'll enjoy it.

Pawel

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FEATURE

When nature and music combine. Exploring studio albums recorded outdoors.

Europe experiences a severe heatwave now. Ireland, where I live, has been hit particularly badly. After all, if you've ever witnessed the typical Irish weather - the damp, the almost constant rain... - then you know that we're not really accustomed to anything else.

But the heatwave has its benefits, too. For one, we get to enjoy the outdoors without having to carry rain clothes, and being drenched in the pouring rain half way down the trail. 

And during a recent family hike, I suddenly thought of a folk album I heard a while ago, "Twice as Nice and Half the Price" by a band called Heron.

The reason, I suppose, my brain connected the sunny day with this music is that the entire album was recorded outdoors. The cover even portrays the session. And naturally, you get to hear the surroundings throughout the record: the wildlife, the livestock (Heron recorded the album in a small cottage in Black Dog, Devon, UK,) the musician's children playing nearby...

The album has an incredible atmosphere, like a document of a pure joy of playing together.

Rediscovering that album led me into a little rabbit hole. Because, as it turns out, Heron's is not the only album recorded in such a way.

• Heron recorded their first, self-titled album, outdoors, too. The band's producer initially tracked them at Pye Studios, but after disliking the "sterility" of studio recording, they moved to the Pook family farmhouse in Appleford, Berkshire, and recorded the whole album with a mobile studio in a field behind the house.
• John Martyn recorded One World (1977) at the producter's (Chris Blackwell) farmhouse sitting in the middle of a flooded gravel pit/lake. Engineer Phill Brown set up an outdoor PA system across the lake and placed microphones outside to capture the natural reverb and ambience (water lapping, geese, a passing train) bleeding back into the recordings. And to make it even more interesting, sessions ran between 3 and 6 am to catch the stillest, most atmospheric sounds of nature.
• Animal Collective recorded the Campfire Songs (a 2003, originally released under Campfire Songs name, only later released as Animal Collective) in a single take on a porch in rural Maryland using only MiniDisc recorders. It's an amazing, very sparse release, with sounds of crickets, rain, and wind audible throughout.
• Andrew Bird several albums in his Echolocations series outdoors. For example, Canyon was recorded inside Coyote Gulch canyon in Utah. Listen carefully and you'll hear wind, a bubbling creek, and insects audible on the record, along with the canyon's natural reverb responding to Bird's violin.
• Patrick Duff recorded Visions of the Underworld in a remote wooden cabin in the Welsh mountains. The recording is deliberately intimate and unprocessed, and you can hear birds, wind, rain and other ambient sounds bleeding into the microphones. Rather than treating them as imperfections, he embraced them as part of the record's atmosphere.
• Adrianne Lenker's Song is recorded in a cabin in Massachusetts; insects, creaking wood, rain and other environmental sounds are intentionally left in the mix.

What fascinates me in those albums is that you're listening to someone making music in a real place, not in an acoustically isolated studio. There are imperfections, and they are beautiful. There is spontaneity that's almost impossible to capture in a studio. And the music becomes part of its surroundings.

And that's magical to me.

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