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The tracks may be played in any order, the random function on most CD players being good for this purpose. By simultaneously using the repeat mode, a continuous and variable sound atmosphere can be achieved. This is the listening mode for which the sounds were originally prepared.
Process: These constructions are the result of a hybrid process developed during experimentation with field recordings and digital montage since about 1992. Attention is payed to the internal contours, subjective qualities and symbolic properties of each recording. A degree of indeterminacy enters through the recording process, while the montage and mixing is largely on the basis of aesthetic decision. Sometimes I allow the recordings to be "au naturale," preserving their integrity, and other times I use processing to alter them, enhancing or diminishing certain qualities, or transforming the sounds entirely. The sonic elements thus exist in a continuum ranging from very organic to very artificial. Intuition plays a large part in the montage and mixing process. For instance, volume changes are usually performed rather than drawn in visually, and sounds are placed relative to one another in time by ear rather than according to any external framework. Some sounds are filtered to enhance pitched components and are played as musical instruments on the sampler. Distance from nature is of course evident in all of these materials Ð processed or unprocessed, they are mediated experience; a small and (mostly) undramatic library of semispecific symbols evidencing approaches to nature (preserve it / catalog and store it / alter it / obscure it / venerate it / fear it / ignore it).
Sound sources include intentional and unintentional field recordings of human and nonhuman sonic landscapes from Germany, New England, Colorado, Seattle, the northern California coast, and the Sierra Nevada mountains.
Recommended reading: Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, edited by William Cronon (Norton, 1996).
-Jeremiah Moore 1999