It is a spring day in a small park surrounded by houses. The weather is warm so people are out and busy with roof repairs. Walking up the slope into the park and then around its area, stopping every now and then to capture the sounds heard in the moment. Sometimes the wind would rise unexpectedly because of the shape and topography of the park. It shook the leaves, sometimes the microphone was close by, sometimes at a 30 foot distance. The last sound is that of a man shouting out the cost of something in thousands. There is the wild wind and an untamed bunny, but the economy is never not nearby.
All were laid out on a single track with short fade in/fade outs linking them and a few trims applied to shorten the duration of some of the takes.
A few days after making this I dipped into Murray Shafer's The Tuning of the World (1977) over an afternoon sandwich and found this quote by Thomas Hardy whose prose description of a 19c English pastoral landscape strongly resonated with my local urbanite listening experience in the park. I marvel at his prose, at how its forthright rhythmic exposition emulate the declarative call of the shepherd from the hill and magically connects the ears to the imagination through mere words on a page.
" The shepherd on the east hill could shout out lambing intelligence to the shepherd on the west hill, over the intervening town chimneys, without great inconvenience to his voice, so nearly did the steep pastures encroach upon the burghers' backyards. And at night it was possible to stand in the very midst of the town and hear from their native paddocks on the lower levels of greensward the mild lowing of the farmers heifer, and the profound, warm blowings of breath in which those creatures indulge."
Thomas Hardy "Fellow Townsmen", Wessex Tales 1920
