Field recordist Jana Winderen’s latest finds her indulging her long-standing passion for capturing the sounds of hidden environments yet again, this time in and around the Barents Sea region of the Arctic Ocean. Using an array of specialized microphones and a great deal of editing, she has woven the resultant decontextualized sounds into an immersive suite of frozen and mysterious desolation.
Energy Field is the sort of album that only a very specific type of person could have made and Jana Winderen is a very specific type of person: an artist living in Norway with a background in both science and fish ecology.Appropriately, it is also the sort of album that only a very specific type of person will enjoy, as it is composed purely of field recordings with no conventionally music elements.Also, its complexity can only be fully appreciated with headphones.
Despite the superficially limited scope of Winderen’s recording trips, she managed to accumulate quite a wide palette of sounds to work with. Aside from the deep undersea rumbles and hums that she was able to capture with hydrophones, Jana also spent some time harvesting sonic raw material from glacier crevasses, fjords, and various terrestrial areas of Greenland and Norway.As such, the three lengthy works collected here incorporate a number of disparate textures: howling winds, pleasantly burbling streams, breaking waves, crashes of thunder, chirping birds, yowling dogs, hungry and/or horny fish, cracking and straining sheets of ice, and a host of other sounds that are not readily identifiable.
The degree to which Winderen has tweaked the recordings is not entirely clear.Obviously, she cleaned them up a bit and combined them in strange and unexpected ways, but they still basically sound recognizable (although I regrettably cannot identify exactly what a crustacean sounds like).At times, some sounds seem to reverberate or echo cavernously in a way that suggests studio enhancement, but it is entirely possible that such resonance is natural.
The emphasis here is, unsurprising, quite firmly centered on process, concept, and the simple wonder of unearthing previously unheard sounds.Nevertheless, Jana does an admirable job of shaping her material into a listenable and quasi-musical arc.For example, there are distinct crescendos of deep multi-tracked bubbling and roaring waves, ominous passages of deep underwater drones, pleasant stretches of placid rippling, and shimmering beds of eerie oscillation and dissonance.It is an oft-mesmerizing soundworld to get drawn into- at its best, Energy Field is able to convey something far larger than any traditional musician could have: the disturbing enormity of the world that we never see.
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