Out of stock
4 CD box
Joshua BONNETTA
“The Pines”
4xCDs housed in oversized digisleeves.
Hardcover slipcase.
12pp booklet with original text by Robert Macfarlane and foreward by jake moore
Sound artist and filmmaker Joshua Bonnetta wants to know what happens when a human listener exits a landscape. How might the soundscape differ? How is our presence affecting the recording? His ambitious long-form work The Pines I-IV, released on February 28, 2025 via Shelter Press and The Dim Coast, looks to interrogate some of these questions, capturing the sonic life of a single pine tree in upstate New York over the course of a year via remote recordings, edited into four hours of audio which will be released as a 4CD set with essay by acclaimed nature writer Robert Macfarlane and a foreword by curator jake moore, who suggests the forest knows when it is being listened to.
Macfarlane’s luminous essay proposes that this project offers an answer to the question of whether a tree in a forest makes any sound at all if nobody is there to hear it. Bonnetta turns that question around – entangling it in the surrounding environment, to ask what sort of noise it and other plants and animals make when there is no human listener; asking what sounds come to the fore when we step out of the frame, and in what ways a microphone might alter the way we listen in the environment.
A total of 8760 hours of audio were captured by a microphone strapped 10ft up a tree’s trunk in Tioga County, which was then reworked into a single hour of sound for each season, each of which captured events in and around the tree’s branches and immediate environment. We hear weather and wildlife; coyotes and owls; the creaking of branches under the weight of snow and ice – all act as a window into the sound of this place absent of humans; a time lapse of the audible world around the circumference of a single tree. The microphones used, and the methods of editing, are tech borrowed from conservation bioacoustics and passive acoustic monitoring, which offered Bonnetta a way to engage much more deeply than any standard field recording would.
The Pines I-IV is not bombastic sonic work, but is subtle, often contemplative and sometimes soothing, as when rushes of rain sweep over the landscape, or a flock of geese pass overhead. It is not about exotic renderings of place or or mythically veiled field recording, but about accessing a new way of listening to something familiar, by removing a human presence and extending the listening window beyond usual human capacities. Bonnetta purposefully chose a site he already knew, and which he had easy access to, but which might show itself differently when captured with durational sound recording technology. "For over a decade I taught in Ithaca" he says "and spent a lot of time exploring southern central New York, but never made any projects there. We decided to relocate to Munich a couple years back and before I left I wanted to document the sounds of this environment that I spent so much time in and had come to love. This technology afforded me the opportunity to be able to keep a record across a year and when I started to listen back I was surprised with results and began to devise a system to edit the work. There are several great bioacoustics applications which can analyze and interpret the data but I wanted to manually browse and edit the materials so that I could collect sounds outside of what the applications might traditionally identify: mainly weather and the sounds of the tree itself. The Dim Coast saw the potential in the work as an installation and publication and helped me realize that there might be a project outside of it just being a personal document."
He returned every few weeks to collect and replace storage cards and batteries, editing lengthy audio files using a combination of listening and looking at the visualized audio spectrum. He spent time listening to re-familiarize himself with the soundscape and then scanned the visual data for ‘events’ in the files, a method of analysis more typically used by scientists mapping bird and wildlife populations.
The draw of this type of recording Bonnetta locates in a childhood memory, of wolves captured on tape: “I grew up in a rural area in Ontario, and I have a very early memory of two brothers from our small school who had said they had made a recording of wolves, which were only rumoured to be as far south as we were. The previous evening they had taken their portable cassette recorder to the edge of their lane, which backed on to a large forest preserve, and claimed to have recorded wolves howling. They played it back at school the next day and I remember that the sound was primarily noise and hiss, but we were all listening intently and straining to hear something as they kept playing back the tape. Whether they were really there or this was just the collective imagination of a group of children, we started to hear wolves – or more likely coyotes. This project feels rooted in the initial wonder of that listening experience”.
45,00€
In stock
LP
Joshua BONNETTA
“Innse Gall”
Bridging acoustic ecology and interdisciplinary creative practice, Joshua Bonnetta returns to Shelter Press with Innse Gall ‘The Islands of the Strangers’, his second LP for the label. Recorded and assembled between 2017 and 2020 and acting as a companion piece to Bonnetta’s film, An Dà Shealladh ‘The Two Sights’, these two interrelated side-long works - Innse Gall I and Innse Gall II - respectively deploy a rigorous approach to field recording and auditory phenomena, pursuing the complex relationship between landscape, place, language, and culture in the Outer Hebrides, where both the film and album’s source material was gathered. Representing a radical rethinking of the potential of sound collage, Innse Gall ‘The Islands of the Strangers’, is issued by Shelter Press as a limited edition, deluxe vinyl LP, housed in a 7mm reverse-board outer sleeve and a heavyweight reverse-board inner sleeve, accompanied by a sixty page booklet containing extensive photographic studies made for ‘The Two Sights’ by the artist and an essay by Erika Balsom, as well as a postcard to download the film An Dà Shealladh ‘The Two Sights’, generously provided by Cinema Guild, and Arsenal - Institut für Film und Videokunst.
While very much the byproduct of sound collage, rather than the states of abstraction and ‘pure’ sonority most often pursued by musique concrète, or an experimental music “free of individual taste and memory (psychology)”, as pursued by John Cage, Bonnetta’s work displays a deeper sympathy with Luc Ferrari’s notion of ‘anecdotal music’, in which the social and autobiographical contexts of the source material / recordings - with their embedded dimensions of meaning - is accounted for and retained. Rather than enforcing a fixed vision of the artist, the listener in encouraged construct a narrative of their own. This is no less the case for Innse Gall ‘The Islands of the Strangers’, comprising two audio works constructed by Bonnetta from field recordings made on the Outer Hebrides islands of Barra, Berneray, North Uist, Harris, & Lewis between 2017-19.
Drawing upon Bonnetta’s fascination with sound as a primary means to survey place and people, Innse Gall ‘The Islands of the Strangers’ draws upon a vast range of sonorous material: hydrophone recordings made over extended periods in lobster creels and of gases escaping a peat bog, interview fragments, and field recordings feature capturing the sounds of maritime industry, song, seals, corncrake, snipe, and other elements of the natural world. Meticulously collaged and reworked within an exploration of the interrelated acoustic ecology of these diverse elements of the islands’ make-up, the album’s two works - Innse Gall I and Innse Gall II - bristle with the subcutaneous narratives embedded within these ancient and modern landscapes, played against the disappearing Gaelic oral traditions which hold their memories, resulting in a deep, auditory reflection on the relationship between narrative, environment, and the reciprocal influences they exact upon one another.
Challenging the perceived boundaries and interconnectedness of place and occupation - to what extent the perception of an environment is modelled by language, culture, and myth, or that the environment underscores the very becoming of those things - Bonnetta’s Innse Gall ‘The Islands of the Strangers’, draws profound poetry, beauty, and meaning from the everyday, rethinking the terms of field recording and sound collage every step of the way.
27,50€