Chris Watson – In St. Cuthbert’s Time: The Sounds of Lindisfarne and the Gospels
In St. Cuthbert’s Time: The Sounds of Lindisfarne and the Gospels is a set of conceptual field recordings made by noted wildlife / BBC sound recordist Chris Watson. Employing nothing but captured soundwaves and photographic images, Watson transports the listener far away in space and time. The place is a tiny island off of Northeast England containing a Christian monastery. The time is the seventh century, smack dab in the middle of the Anglo Saxon Period. While the bishop of Lindisfarne, Eadfrith, sits snug inside the monastery writing a richly illustrated book of the Christian New Testament called the Lindisfarne Gospels, the sounds of the natural world ebb and flow all around him. As a steady drone of crashing ocean waves roars in the background, “Winter” really brings on the birds in the form of ducks, Greylag geese, Brent geese, whooper swans and wigeons–all of which warble and chirp away. Spurred on by a stalking fox, the bird and ocean sounds coalesce into a hectic and strange sonic web.
“Lencten” introduces some elder ducks, drakes, ringed plovers, skylarks, curlews, blackbirds and snipes either flying overhead, chirping or frolicking in the water. Parts of this track in particular sound quite strange, sort of like a drunk splashing around in a bathtub. “Sumor” stumbles upon a bunch of oystercatchers, arctic terns, linnets, whitethroats, yellow hammers, cuckoos, swallows, martins and starlings with a few insects and grazing cattle thrown in for good measure. “Haerfest” closes out the program with a phalanx of golden plovers, redshanks, dunlins and starlings, along with hissing reeds, bellowing red deer stags and grey seals, punctuated by a coda of splashing waves. Anyone expecting any kind of electro-acoustic composition on this CD may possibly find themselves disappointed, but at the same time, it should definitely appeal to birders and fans of straight up field recordings.
Label: Touch Catalog Number: TO:089 Format: CD Packaging: Digi-Pak Tracks: 4 Total Time: 58:28 Country: United Kingdom Released: 2013 More: Discogs, Forced Exposure, Official, The Quietus, Wikipedia
Text ©2013 Arcane Candy
Leave a Reply