Cashmere Guest Mixes SoundCube: on the acoustics of natural spaces

Exploring music and landscape, thinking about what happens to sound once we leave the room.

Sounds travelling through trees, across water and through warm air. Music heard from somewhere in the distance. Open windows, long afternoons, moving leaves — and that particular feeling of summer when the boundaries between inside and outside become less defined.

At the centre of the show are two listening pieces that approach the acoustic life of a landscape from very different directions.

Janet Cardiff's Forest Walk was created in 1991 during a residency at the Banff Centre in Canada and became her first audio walk. Cardiff guides the listener along a forest path while footsteps, voices, crows, a distant train and fragments of narrative enter the recording. Using binaural sound, the recorded acoustic space begins to overlap with the physical space occupied by the listener, somewhere between a soundscape, a memory and an imagined place.

Later, the mix moves from listening to the forest to listening through the material of a tree itself.

In Inumaki, Esuzaki, Ludwig Berger attached a contact microphone to an Inumaki tree during strong wind on Esuzaki Island, Japan, in 2018. Rather than recording the forest through the air, he captured vibrations travelling from the upper branches through the trunk. The hour-long recording was left unedited and unprocessed, revealing a strange and complex musicality produced by the interaction between wind and tree.

Around these fragments, music moves in and out of imagined landscapes, sometimes through actual environmental sound, sometimes through echo, texture, repetition or simply a guitar that feels like being among trees.

For open windows, trees overhead, water nearby and slow summer days 🙂