THE TRUE BEAUTY OF FIELD RECORDING IS THAT IT FORCES YOU TO LET GO.
In 1978 Brian Eno was lying in bed with a broken leg after slipping on a wet road and being hit by a car, listening to an album of harp music. However, the volume was so low that the music started mixing in Eno’s mind with the surrounding environmental sounds. Thus, ambient mu- sic was born.
Perhaps Eno’s ambient peak came with the release of Ambient 4: On Land. Eno spent the best part of three years collecting field recordings, from a seaside village in England to tree frogs in Honduras. Largely abandoning his synthesizers, he instead augmented the recordings with found sounds like tapping sticks and rolling stones.
You can bring these field recording techniques into your own work by embracing mistakes and randomness. In fact, Eno’s own Oblique Strategies cards are a perfect way to do this. Available for free online, they give prompts like ‘Turn it upside down’ and ‘Do nothing for as long as possible’.
Another Eno trick was to heavily process his found sounds. So rather than just inserting the sound of a stream, try side chaining it to your vocoder to create a weird effect. Or reverse an animal recording and crank up the reverb until it becomes a shimmering, other-worldly voice. In the end, field recording is a never-ending experiment, and the goal is always to capture something that wouldn’t be possible in the studio.
