Chilean Birdsong to Drone Aircraft: Bang on a Can All-Stars' 'More Field Recordings'

At times intense, unsettling and raw, the Bang on a Can All-Stars’ new release More Field Recordings, serves as a shadowy sequel to their charming and equally substantial 2015 Field Recordings album. As their titles suggest, both chapters in this project exploit sounds captured in the real world, combining audio from outside the concert hall with the sound of Bang on a Can's storied chamber ensemble. 

The list of composers involved in the project ranges from rock stars (Dan Deacon, Wilco's Glenn Kotche, Arcade Fire's Richard Reed Parry), to famous classical composers, insofar as there is such a thing (Nico Muhly, whose new opera Marnie has just opened in London; Caroline Shaw, of Roomful of Teeth fame), to composers who seem destined for broader recognition (Paula Matthusen, René Lussier). 

Each one has thought deeply about the significance of their borrowed audio. Shaw's Really Craft When You, for instance, opens the album with a sample of archival interviews with Southern quilters, and their down-to-earth conceptions of form and beauty wink at the composer’s own.

A few of the composers use the “field recordings” concept to ponder the music of nature. Gabriella Smith's Panitao creates a strange musical aviary for distorted Chilean birdsong and ensemble, while Fields by Anna Thorvaldsdóttir, incorporating the sound of footfalls in her country's desolate lava fields, literalizes both the title of this project and the composer's tendency to draw inspiration from the Icelandic wilderness. 

Other samples on the record are… decidedly unnatural. Both Muhly and his frequent collaborator Ben Frost recorded the sound of a jet plane: Muhly perversely juxtaposing the sound of a sleepy acoustic guitar with the hellish sound of a baby screaming on an airliner for Comfortable Cruising Altitude, Frost using frightening live drones to accompany the roar of a drone aircraft for his Negative Ghostrider II. 

Lussier gets the last word with his Nocturnal, a suitably insomniac conclusion to a decidedly nocturnal record. He transforms that most intimate arietta, the snores of a sleeping lover, into an affectionately comic chamber movement. Music, he shows us, is all around: even in the dark, in your own bed, when you’re the only one awake.

Bang on a Can All-Stars: More Field Recordings
Released Nov. 10, 2017 | Available on Amazon