VA: Sound of the Wetlands
Gruenrekorder

Curated by Adam Stanovic, Director of the Sound and Music Programme at London's University of the Arts, and Chilean sound artist Felipe Otondo, Associate Professor at Universidad Austral de Chile and leader of the research project SoundLapse, Sound of the Wetlands is a double-CD compilation (300 copies) of sonic collages created by composers and sound artists from the Valdivia and London regions. Inspired by SoundLapse-based projects made using recordings of the wetlands around Valdivia, staff and students from the Sound and Music Programme ventured to the London Wetlands Centre (LWC) to also collect site recordings of the site and its surrounding areas.

With sixteen pieces stretching across ninety-eight minutes, the presentation is comprehensive and diverse. In addition to producing idiosyncratic responses to the settings, the contributors also became aware of the global decline in wetland environments and of the LWC's plan to create 100,000 hectares of sustainable wetlands in the United Kingdom. As each participant in the recording project was granted free creative licence, it doesn't surprise that the results vary dramatically. In one case, the incorporation of beats brands the material as more of an electronica-styled treatment, whereas another gravitates in the direction of goth and dreampop, of all things. Contributions come from the curators, naturally, but many others took part as well.

Otondo partnered with fellow Chilean sound artist Natán Ide Pizarro for the set-opening Oncol mix, assembled from field recordings made in the Valdivian Rainforest and designed to represent the sound changes that occur within the Oncol Park over one day. Right away one is transported into the setting when the vocalizations of various bird and insect species meld with swelling water sounds and other nature details in an evolving soundscape. Kin to Oncol mix is Leonardo Santos's immersive Tiempo Austral for presenting a day-long “sound photograph” of Valdivia, from early morning birdsong and mid-day rainfall to the night symphony of birds, insects, and amphibians. The train-like whistles arcing across the animated landscape in Venus en Valdivia by Ecuadorian composer Diego Benalcazar actually turn out to be a couple of double flutes from the pre-Hispanic cultures of Ecuador. Even with bird vocalizations present, the treatment nudges his soundscape in a minimalism direction when the high-register flute sonorities flutter repeatedly across its gently convulsing base.

The scene shifts to the LWC for electroacoustic composer Julia Schauerman's Flight Path, which vividly places the listener at a site where nature's creatures must daily contend with the engulfing industrial noise of overhead planes. A similar juxtaposition follows in Daniel Pakdel's Black Marsh Sun, though in this case the gleam of organ timbres threads its way into the design. Making his position clear, Pakdel states that in his “mythopoetic retelling we imagine these wetlands slowly submerged in darkness.” Max Elmore also explores the tension between the industrial and natural worlds in Contested Territory, though in his case he incorporated field recordings from both London and Valdivia in the soundscape's hallucinatory swirl of creature chatter, landscape sounds, and ominous aircraft roar. Jerome Dodd likewise explores the tension between protected natural spaces and rapid urbanization in his foreboding piece Loss, his feelings, like Pakdel's, conveyed in the mournfulness of the birds' cries and the encroaching domination of the city. The brutalizing screech of cars, buses, motorcycles, planes, and other transport vehicles recurs throughout Stanovic's Encircled to reflect the nerves-fraying cacophony of central London that ever threatens to obliterate the calm-inducing quiet of the wetland environment.

Cypriot guitarist and composer Berk Yagli initiates the second CD with False Awakening on a Mediterranean Island, his desire to create a “dream-like false awakening state” fully realized in the sensory overload of the soundscape. A tad less frenetic is TQ 228770 by Robert Colman (aka ixzo), its title a reference to the LWC's grid marking. Scratchy clicks'n'cuts beat patterns sourced from an electronic drum kit rub shoulders with bat and bird recordings and other nature and industrial textures to create a heady phantasmagoria lasting nearly fifteen minutes. Elsewhere, in Lemai Valentina Valderas tours the island of Mancera in a soundscape that merges trombone (!) with sounds of beaches, rain, frogs, insects, and birds. To create the acousmatic piece Naiad, Jiajing Zhao used hydrophones to move way from land-sourced sounds to document the lively vibrational ones below the water's surface. Returning to the airplane focus of some earlier pieces, the title of Angus Carlyle's 2420 ft comes from the average altitude of a plane on its final approach to Heathrow; the ominous noise of the aircraft is omnipresent but offset by the humanizing sounds of playing children and various bird types.

Piano and synthesizers work their way into Nelchael Recabarren's Sensibilidad Natural to add a soothing moment of calm to the release, after which Sebastian Ubeda Mardones does something similar with Parque Etéreo (“etéreo” means “ethereal”), a treatment that, with its electric guitar, bass, and swaying rhythm, is as much tropical reverie as soundscape. Even poppier is the set-ending Changing the Balance by London-based Julia Pytko, an experimental electronic piece blending LWC field recordings with distorted spoken-word vocals and glitchy textures.

November 2025