³§³ó°ù±ð»å»å±ð°ù²õÌý´Ç´Ú a certain age will recall a time, before the ramps needed staircases and the trick names started to sound like mathematical proofs, when skateboarding was all about style. These were the days. The days. The sun was out, the waves were flat, and the farther back you could lean with your feet piled up at the nose and your hands pitched behind your back was the pinnacle of cool.

That’s the era a cruiser board like the aims to resurrect. Seven slabs of Canadian rock maple pressed with deep concave ensure a ton of board feel underfoot, while the punk-point nose and bold graphics invoke backyard pool sessions fueled by Black Sabbath and the Stooges.

At 27 inches long, the Jetty is unlikely to yield to attempts to spin it into a Smith grind on a handrail, nor is it designed to. But the high-durometer Burnout wheels mean you can throw a power slide or two on a downhill to keep from eating shit. Because, as any Dogtown lord will tell you, there are no style points for eating shit.

$120;

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J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine

J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine

Lawrence English’s The Peregrine

Lawrence English’s The Peregrine

J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine is the of nature writing—not a lot of people have read it, let alone heard of it, yet Baker’s molten prose laid the groundwork for numerous travel writers (Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiessen, W. G. Sebald) whose obsession with the natural world’s capacity to reclaim us is, like Baker’s, near total. Published in 1967, the book had a simple conceit: from fall to spring, the author would chronicle the comings and goings of two peregrine falcons in East Anglia, on England’s eastern coast, near where Baker lived and worked as a librarian. The book takes the form of a diary, but The Peregrine is no birder memoir. As autumn turns to winter, Baker’s senses sharpen and his observations become increasingly unhinged as the lines separating his frame of reference from that of his quarry fade and then disappear. Notes Robert Macfarlane in his introduction to the 2004 New York Review Books edition:

“Everything that takes place in The Peregrine takes place within the borders of the peregrines’ hunting ground. The story does not extend beyond this landscape. No cause is specified for the quest itself, no triggering detail. No other human character besides Baker is admitted. We are told nothing of Baker’s life outside the field: we do not even know where he sleeps or what he eats. All of this information, we sense, is withheld not to provoke inquiry, but because it is irrelevant. Irrelevant, for The Peregrine is not a book about watching a bird, it is a book about becoming a bird.”

All of which makes Baker’s text somewhat odd fodder for an electronic-music homage. Of course, composers have been exploiting sound’s potential to evoke nature at least since Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, and Brian Eno’s Ambient 4: On Land, released in 1982 and heavily synthesized, was loosely intended as an audio portrait of Britain’s countryside. But, like the book it was based on, Australian composer Lawrence English’s The Peregrine, released this month on Ohio label Experimedia, plunges much more deeply into the wild. A single 35-minute piece, it begins as an austere drone (a palate cleanser for the ears) before moving through passages of serene calm, creeping solicitude, and brute violence–closely following the passage of time, the rhythms of the landscape, and the appearance and disappearance of the birds as, high above, they sweep the Essex bush in search of prey. As with Baker’s text, the composer seems to recede as sound sheets the landscape like weather. Both Peregrines are that rare document of nature experienced not at the level of the mind or the soul but of the nerve endings. We spoke to English to find out how it came together.

OUTSIDE: Why Baker's Peregrine? Are you a bird enthusiast?
ENGLISH: No book has affected me as strongly. In some ways, I'm not even sure why. I am partial to birds—some of my earliest sound experiences involved birds, specifically an Australian species called the . And I've always been interested in raptors. So it's perhaps not surprising that The Peregrine piqued my attention.

How pertinent was Baker’s prose to your own writing process?
It was the starting place for so many of the ideas in the piece, right down to the structure, which moves through each of the months he seeks out the birds. But I also used references in Baker’s writing to sound and the appearance of the landscape to shape the composition. For example, his descriptions of the density of mist or clouds, of the undulation of the hillside and the qualities of light on surfaces, became like a musical script for me. His writings suggested how I might come at the music’s shape and texture. I looked for and found compositional guides in his words.

And yet the music is totally electronic.
In some ways, the two are the same for me. When we hear a sound from the natural world and it's not something we’ve experienced firsthand, we use our imagination to create an impression of what might be making it. For example, the first time I heard a was on a recording. I had no idea what I was listening to. I thought it could be a strange mammal or maybe an insect recorded very closely. I created an entirely distinct impression using sound markers from other auditory experiences. The line between natural sound and electronic sound is similarly blurred for me, and I’m always interested in accentuating that blur in my pieces.

Baker’s account of his seasons with the falcons is pretty immersed—he seems to go native. Did you aim for something like that in your work?
You imagine him going native, but at the same time he was an English gentleman living in pastoral countryside, without much space to really go native. What I did try to draw out from his experience was the flow of the seasons. I wanted to create a piece that moved like the book does, creating hints of elements to come. There are passages where winter breaks for a moment, only to return with brutish ferocity. I found those kinds of details very important for the recording. It was designed as a complete journey.

Has your own experience of nature changed?
Baker's descriptions certainly made me think about how the natural world can be viewed. When you read his work, even more so in The Hill of Summer [Baker’s second book], he has remarkable eyes and ears. He takes in these vast, sweeping landscapes and still manages to find motion and inspiration in the tiniest bird displays, in anthills, in the movement of light across the tree line. His ability to marry the vast with the intimate really made me consider how natural places can be experienced, and how music might be able to reflect that.

The post Primal Shriek appeared first on ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Online.

For as long as recording equipment has existed, we've been pointing it at hippos, shoving it down anthills, and dropping it into the sea—to learn more about animal behavior, document changes in ecosystems, or just freak out at the crazy sounds nature makes. Recent strides in digital-audio technology and the availability of smaller and more sensitive microphones have made it possible to probe further down the food chain, where sound plays just as important a role in organizing the lives of species as it does among the birds, bees, coyotes, and rhinoceri. They've also enabled conventional musicians to tap into the compositional potential of the natural world. Presenting 50 years of field recording's greatest hits.

Songs of the Humpback Whale

CRM Records, 1970

The granddaddy of them all. If you grew up in the 1970s, your parents had a copy of this (and were probably rolling joints on the sleeve before you came along). Roger Payne, the oceanographer credited with discovering vocalization among the massive marine mammals, used military-issue —missile-shaped piezoelectric devices sensitive to the pressure effects of sound traveling through water instead of air—to document the alien blips, blurps, screeches, and flutters echoing through the nameless deep. Payne's recordings were later credited with raising awareness about species endangerment, culminating in commercial-whaling bans in the 1980s.

Did You Know: Payne's whale recordings were included on Sounds from Earth, the gold-plated LP placed aboard Voyager 1.

Environments 1: The Psychologically Ultimate Seashore

Syntonic Research, 1969

The Environments series ran to 11 volumes, produced between 1969 and 1979 by a Manhattan company called Syntonic Research, whose avowed interest was in exploring the relationship between mood and the sonic environment. Psychologically Ultimate Seashore—a 30-minute recording of nothing but tumbling, lapping waves—was dreamed up by Syntonic founder Irv Tiebel and noted avant-garde composer Tony Conrad, who in turn credited environmental artist Walter De Maria's use of ocean recordings in his installations. Tiebel employed a standard reel-to-reel tape machine and a cheap portable mic to capture excerpts of ocean waves on the shores of Brooklyn's Brighton Beach, then fed everything into an early IBM mainframe, applying rudimentary digital processing to produce an experience Tiebel described as “more real than real.”

Did You Know: Tiebel made his recordings after night fell to limit bird sounds and other distractions, although distant foghorns can occasionally be heard.

Brian Eno, Ambient 4: On Land

Editions EG, 1982

Eno's experiments with ambient music purportedly trace to the 1970s, when a living room stereo with the volume too low and a broken-legged Eno confined to the couch compelled him to question the distinction between music and the environment in which it's heard. True or not, the story syncs up neatly with On Land, which combined field recordings from the North English countryside, Honduras, and Ghana with spare instrumentation (that's a bass guitar on “Lizard Point”) and heavily reconstituted portions of Eno's back catalog. Eno described On Land as the end result of a process of “composting”—collaging together source materials, mangling them with studio effects, and then feeding everything back into the mixing desk to be mangled once more. It remains the most evocative musical exploration of place ever made.

Did You Know: “Dunwich Beach, Autumn, 1960” refers to a once bustling port city in the southeast of England, a site of severe coastal erosion that was gradually subsumed by the North Sea.

The Atmosphere Collection: Thunderstorm

Rykodisc, 1995

A quick Amazon search turns up more than 150 thunderstorm CDs. For sheer cardiac-arrest potential, none compare to this one. Released, inexplicably, on Rykodisc, a reissue label whose finest moment was making Frank Zappa's catalog available in the early '90s, Thunderstorm is World War Three in your living room. There is heavy rain, yes, and there are high winds, but the bone-cracking thunderclaps are the main event here, and they were recorded, mixed, and mastered entirely digitally—a rarity for nature recordings until only recently—which means that Thunderstorm is the next best thing to standing on the top of a Colorado fourteener in the middle of June, hoping to God your wedding ring .

Did You Know: Thunderstorm CDs have helped dogs suffering from brontophobia curb their urge to hide under the bed.

Sounds of North American Frogs

Smithsonian Folkways, 1998

First issued in the 1950s but finally reaching a wide audience at millennium's end (), Sounds of North American Frogs is an aural encyclopedia of native species, alone and in group settings, interspersing frog and toad calls with the distinctively Eisenhower-era narration of herpetologist Charles M. Bogert. No less than 57 species are spotlighted here—everything from Hyla crucifer (the spring peeper) to Rana grilio (the pig frog) to Scaphiopus bombifrons (the plains spadefoot toad)—and the sheer variety of chirps, barks, trills, and whistles they produce is astounding. Bogert's narration, meanwhile, with its alternating focus on regional ephemera and obscure acoustical detail (pulsation rates, cycles per second), is its own kind of priceless.

Did You Know: Remembered mainly as the force behind the 1950s folk revival, Moses Asch's Folkways label, acquired by the Smithsonian in 1987, was also a field-recordings giant, releasing everything from Sounds of Insects to Sounds of the Annual International Sports Car Grand Prix of Watkins Glen, N.Y.

Chris Watson, Weather Report

Touch, 2003

Chris Watson was a founding member of Cabaret Voltaire and the Hafler Trio, two influential UK post-punk groups, but for the past three decades he has traveled the world as a sound recordist for the BBC. He never stopped making records: Stepping into the Dark and Inside the Circle of Fire, released in the mid-'90s, are landscape and species recordings, respectively; for the latter, Watson went so far as to insert omnidirectional microphones into a zebra carcass to document the feeding sounds of vultures. Less gruesome is Weather Report, three time-dilated pieces—seamless studio creations collaged together from longer recordings. “Ol-Olool-Ol,” set in the Kenyan savanna, begins with the roar of a lion, moves through the agitated bustle of farmers and livestock as a storm approaches, and ends with a nighttime chorus of insects and the salutary bark of a hyena. “Vatnajokull,” a glacier recording, pairs an eerie drone produced by a subsurface river with the creak and moan of the ice, passing gulls, and seal and puffin jabber.

Did You Know: The British band Doves hired Watson to remix their song “.” (Oddly, bird sounds were used.)

Tucker Martine, Broken Hearted Dragonflies

Sublime Frequencies, 2004

During mating season in Southeast Asia, male dragonflies congregate into bilious swarms and emit deafening sheets of high-pitched tones in an effort to attract females. According to lore, the lucky ones pair up, while the spurned continue their manic shrieking until, bodies overtaxed by the effort, their chests explode and they drop lifeless to the ground. Martine traveled to Laos, Burma, and Thailand to capture the insects' odd lament for Broken Hearted Dragonflies. It's unsettling listening—imagine a million jet engines united in a piercing, accelerating whine—but the knowledge that what you're hearing is perhaps the last forlorn gasp of an evolutionary lustmord makes it oddly compelling, too.

Did You Know: When he's not traveling the world documenting exploding wildlife, Martine produces records by the likes of the Decembrists and Bill Frisell.

David Dunn, The Sound of Light in Trees

EarthEar, 2006

The Sound of Light in Trees documents an ecological holocaust—the destruction of northern New Mexico's forests by , the lowly bark beetle. Dunn, a composer and acoustic ecologist, spent years developing tiny probe mics that could be placed in spaces conventional recording equipment couldn't reach. His recordings capture both the moist clicks and chirps of the beetles as they gnaw away at the wood's fibrous cellulose and the creaks and groans of the tree bending under the weight of strong winds and the insects' relentless onslaught. According to Dunn's extensive notes, some of the sounds, which are produced by a textured area on the back of the beetle's head, may help organize and regulate the distribution of colonies as they chew their way through the trees.

Did You Know: Destruction of piñon tree populations in some areas of the American Southwest due to bark beetle infestation are predicted to be total.

Jana Winderen, The Noisiest Guys on the Planet

Ash International, 2009

Quick: What's the creepiest sound you've ever heard? Whatever it is, it's got nothing on Jana Winderen's 2009 recording of decopods scuttling about on the ocean floor off the coast of Scandinavia. Decapods—the order of ten-legged crustaceans that includes lobsters, shrimps, and crayfish—use as many as half of their appendages to paralyze and dispatch prey or, more often, to pick at the crumbling remains left behind by larger sea predators, a fact that only amplifies the grisliness suggested by the muculent chatter heard on The Noisiest Guys on the Planet. Like Roger Payne and his whale-song recordings, Winderen used sensitive hydrophones, lowering them hundreds of feet into the sea to capture the briny clamor with chilling clarity.

Did You Know: Winderen was awarded the —the Grammy of digital sound art; past recipients include Peter Gabriel and Aphex Twin—for Energy Field, a CD in which her decapods figure prominently.

Tom Lawrence, The Water Beetles of Pollardstown Fen

Gruenrekorder, 2011

Pollardstown Fen is an ancient, 500-acre, spring-fed alkali marsh in County Kildare, 30 miles west of Dublin, but to listen to these hydrophone recordings by Irish musicologist Tom Lawrence, you'd think it was a well-stocked video arcade circa 1985. Electronic stabs, pulsing laser blasts, and a thick blanket of granular static made by the , , and skimming across the ponds' surfaces are among the least natural-sounding nature sounds you're ever likely to hear. To conjure them, the insects use a process called stridulation, a kind of self-frottage (think crickets) in which textured portions of the elytra and exoskeleton are rubbed, plucked, and otherwise abraded to produce sounds of varying frequency and tone. What are they saying? Beyond general speculation about mating behavior and territorial disputes, scientists aren't sure.

Did You Know: Many of Ireland's fens dried up to form its now ubiquitous ; Pollardstown survived thanks to a steady supply of water from an adjacent aquifer.

Honorable Mention: Higher Intelligence Agency and Biosphere, Polar Sequences

Beyond, 1996

In 1995, an arts group in Tromsø, located in the northernmost fjords of Norway, about 200 miles inside the Arctic Circle, commissioned a piece from a composer that would use the local geography as inspiration. The result was a live performance by Tromsø's Geir Jenssen (Biosphere) and British electronica artist Bobby Bird (Higher Intelligence Agency) held in a cabin atop Mount Storsteinen, Tromsø's highest point. Jenssen and Bird took the commission literally, spanning out over the city with their microphones to capture its acoustic profile in minute detail: the trinkle of meltwater, the crackling of ice fields as the day warmed, the clank and strain of the (the cable car required to reach the cabin where the performance would take place). Then they loaded everything into their samplers and sequencers and arranged it into a stunning snapshot of life at the edge of the world.

Did You Know: The pair repeated the project three years later in the form of Birmingham Frequencies, which drew its source material from Bird's hometown—with decidedly more urban results.

The post Noise From the Field: The Top 10 Field Recordings appeared first on ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Online.

1. Half Map, Half Radio

The voice-prompted Jensen Rock-n-Road GPS navigator with optional XM mini-tuner ($30) guides you smoothly through detailed street grids, while the 8GB memory stores thousands of audio files. $800;

2. Light and Loaded

Jays’ Tic-Tac-size q-Jays dish up sound twice as rich as those cheapies you got with your player, but they’re also comfy enough for long-haul listening. $179;

3. Fills and Filters

Creative’s Aurvana X-Fi Noise-Canceling Headphones strip away the drone of a jet engine but can also restore (some of) the depth compressed out of MP3s. $300;

4. Little Big Screen

SanDisk’s 4GB, eraser-size Sansa Clip isn’t the only music player that fastens to your shirt collar or backpack strap, but it’s the best we’ve seen that doesn’t eighty-six the display. $80;

5. Audio + Radio

Combine your satellite radio and music player with the pocket-friendly 2GB Sirius Stiletto 2. A TiVo-like feature lets you record or rewind broadcasts. $330 (plus $142 subscription);

6. Take Everything

Apple’s brawniest model to date, the 160-gig iPod Classic lets you bring along your entire music collection. And dozens of movies. And all your high-res photos from the trip. $349;

7. Decked-Out Dash

Sat-radio ready? USB port? iPod integration? MP3s, WMAs, AACs? Yes, yes, yes, and yes. Alpine’s intuitive iDA-X300 stereo outfits your ride with any music format, unless it’s on a CD. $200;

8. Wireless Sports Star

Athletes: RCA’s 1GB Jet Stream has all the stopwatch and step-and calorie-counting functions you need, plus a set of Kleer wireless earphones, which beat Bluetooth on fidelity. $140;

9. Low Overhead

Sony’s reasonably priced MDR-AS100W headphones have a
superlight band that keeps the full-sounding buds from popping out during workouts. $99;

10. At Your Fingertips

Brilliant sound, Bluetooth syncing, and a vivid three-inch touch-screen make Samsung’s 4GB P2 multimedia player one of the most impressive pocket theaters we’ve seen. $229;

11. Party in a Suitcase

Though it’s only one inch thick, the Altec Lansing SoundBlade’s flat-panel drivers push out impressively full sound. Plus, it connects to almost any device via Bluetooth or a jack. $130;

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