Recording Adventures Day 1

Today we have been exploring the greater Auckland area in a quest to satisfy all our initial recording concepts. The below photographs were taken at North Head one of the locations that we visited over the course of the day. This day for us was about experimenting with gathering any recording that the group was curious about.

Underground

One big thing that I noticed change through experimentation was our practice, my initial idea of recording underground at North Head was quite popular with the group once we got started, something that developed from that was a level of creating our own sound.

North Head proved a great venue because of the many broken or wrecked elements that were around to be experimented with, there was also a nice acoustic quality that came from recording in combined spaces. We have tried to stay away from being too 'musical' a lot of the sounds are rhythmic but I feel this does act to create a dark mood that suits the recorded sounds.

On review of the sounds we got I really like some of the starting elements, I do however feel that some of them are overdone as if we have tried to record too much at once and thus lost any purity of sound. I would be super keen to head back tomorrow with a bit more purpose and record some purer sounds as I think the location has some wonderful potential and a really dark ambient sound.

Interestingly the tunnels were also full of visiting families for the school holidays and we have found that a lot of high pitched children's voices have got into our recordings. Far from being a problem I actually really enjoyed the contrast between the high pitched child enthusiasm and the low pitch sounds created by us underground, I really want to experiment with combining these two when I come to editing my field recordings.

Our happy group (and Chris in a daisy chain!)