This afternoon, tired of trying to listen to quiet music at home at the same time as having Bruce Springsteen albums blasted at me from a room on the other side of the house I took a long walk out into the countryside. I made the decision to leave my iPod at home so as to try and follow Brian Olewnick’s advice and “listen to everything else that’s going on”

I take these walks often, and have done for the best part of twenty years now, following one of a few routes that I know like the back of my hand, and have watched change down the years, partly by mankind, partly by nature. I rarely walk without music, or spoken word audio of some kind to accompany me however. Invariably if I’ve found an hour or two for myself to be able to take a walk then I’ll take along music, simply as there is always unlistened-to music here, and a few hours alone when I’m able to concentrate feels like it shouldn’t be wasted.

This afternoon wasn’t a waste though. The weather was bright and crisp, cold enough for me to put on my most recent acquisition, a woolly hat. I’ve never worn a hat out of choice before in my entire life, but having read somewhere recently that no self-respecting man should enter a mid-life crisis without a good hat I went and bought one. It certainly keeps my head warm nicely on the cold walks home from work I am undertaking at the moment, and doubles as a neat way to keep iPod headphones in my ears, something I am otherwise anatomically incapable of doing. But I digress…

No headphones this afternoon, but certainly alert ears as I tried to relax and take in the sounds about me as I walked. All of the sounds you might expect were there, the wind in the trees and the grass, the occasional cow calling out loud to announce something to the world, birds of all sizes twittering or squwaking, the distant bangs and crashes of human life, passing airplanes and if you listen closely a constant low rumble as the sound of the dual carriageway a couple of miles away carried on the wind.

Walking like this, and listening carefully as you go feels like a cleansing experience for the ears. A good walk always makes me feel brighter and happier, but this one also cleared my head, as if someone had inserted a CD lens cleaner disc into my brain. (Do those lens cleaners actually work by the way? I’ve never used one but I don’t understand how they actually operate) When I got home the house was empty and quiet so it felt good to put on music and listen with my freshly cleaned ears.

I returned to the disc I had been trying to listen to earlier in the morning, a disc I made of Mp3 downloads of field recordings made by Lee Patterson as part of the Half Life event way up in the Argyll region of the Scottish Highlands in September 2007. The recordings can be found for free here at the Arika site alongside recordings made by Toshiya Tsunoda, who worked with Patterson and film-maker Luke Fowler for two weeks. I am a huge fan of Lee Patterson’s field recording work, which can capture a wide range of sound sources from everyday objects found about the house to the kind of material featured in these recordings. Sounds uncovered in the open air, from the obvious sounds of birds and water through to the sound of wire fences, discarded objects and any number of other acoustic phenomena can appear in Lee’s work, some of which later finds its way into his set-up as an improvising musician. So far though none of his field recording work has been released on CD, which is a shame and makes these Mp3 files all the more essential to grab.

The Argyll recordings are beautiful, a nice and quite different companion to the two CD set of recordings released by Tsunoda last year. My favourite of the four solo Patterson pieces (a “duo” recording with Tsunoda can also be found at the same site) seems to capture the sound of a metal object of some kind, which is struck every so often, maybe by Patterson’s hand, maybe by a more natural force, as in the near distance human conversation can be just about heard, blown about on the wind. That simple description doesn’t do the piece justice but there is little point in me describing the recordings here when you can go and download them yourself for free anyway. If you have any interest in field recordings I suggest you do.

After all this outdoor listening, this evening I’ve been listening to the Jason Kahn / Takefumi Naoshima release titled in a room. I’ve listened to it twice tonight so far, once via speakers and once with headphones, The two listening experiences have been very different. I haven’t really formulated my thoughts on this album fully enough yet to write much, but maybe tomorrow I will, and given the recent theme here of speakers vs headphone listening it may be nice to compare the two.

For now, having just read a couple of reviews of the new Ferran Fages guitar album I am just unwrapping it from the shrinkwrap, dimming the lights, pouring the whisky and settling down to listen.