Show Notes
“I try to find places that still carry a bit of this [...] feeling that [...] something might be watching me in the place I try to record, or that I may have some problems with finding my way back from the recording spot. [...] [R]ecording there [gives] a chance to capture this raw energy of nature.”
In this episode of Wind Is the Original Radio, the Earth.fm podcast, site curator Melissa Pons talks with Jakub Orzęcki. An acoustic ecologist and field recording artist based in Wrocław, southwestern Poland, Jakub was nominated for the Sound of the Year Awards in 2022, in the category of Best Natural Sound.
Jakub has made it his mission to highlight the noise pollution increasingly affecting acoustically sensitive areas, and to archive changes occurring in sonic environments. However, as well as exploring Poland’s remote wilderness and underground environments, his work also encompasses the acoustic heritage of the local folklore and traditions which are coming under threat from globalization. With his Polish Soundscapes initiative, Jakub records and assesses the relationship between biophony, geophony, and anthropophony within his homeland’s acoustic environment.
In their conversation, Melissa and Jakub discuss a novel way of thinking about his field recording work: the notion that different recordings have flavors. For Jakub, this relates to the emotions he feels in the place where they are made - maybe a flavor of adventure (for example, in relation to soundscapes “tied to [an effortful] expedition”), or the flavor of being “the first person in a place for a very long time”. There’s even the flavor of preparation and analysis, drawing on “old descriptions of [a] place[,] [...] of settlements that once existed there” and grounded in everything from maps of topography, light pollution, and air traffic to Lidar-based terrain models.
Jakub also describes a more primeval flavor - one that comes from respect for, or even fear of nature, and which “mix[es] [...] fascination and unease”. This sonic flavor reminds us that, for most of human history, natural environments were so much more unpredictable, stronger, and powerful than we were, whether in the form of forests, rivers, mountains, or swamps. Capturing that sensation tells us how “small [we] are compared to what surrounds [us]”.
They also delve into topics including:
‘Sonic nostalgia’: a notion prompted by the disparity between the soundscapes of Jakub’s childhood, spent in his mother’s picturesque home village, and those he experienced when returning to the same area as an adult. From a “quite simple and [...] even [...] old-fashioned” way of life that “harmonized with [the] forces of nature in a perfect way”, the “sounds of [the] river where [he] played with [his] cousins [and the] beautiful sounds of the hay fields” had been overtaken by quite different sounds generated from the sand extraction sites that the riverbanks had become, while the forests were filled with industrial noise
The “hidden critical potential” to field recording, which means it “can be a declaration of [the recordist’s] worldview”, akin to a protest song. Jakub explains how a field recordist is able to provide commentary by “reveal[ing] what is in [a particular] soundscape [...], what's disappearing and how human activity shapes it” - in his case, mainly in relation to awareness of noise pollution, but also on broader issues like migration, pandemics, or women’s rights
A traditionalist worldview - not politically, but one that embraces “a sensitivity to what's being lost” and an “uneas[iness] about the future”. For Jakub, that manifests as a “longing for sounds that are disappearing”, as well as “a quiet sense of anti-consumerism and anti-globalism”, given the way in which transport, industrialization, and tourism can be detrimental to biophony, geophony, and traditional folk sounds
Field recording as an act of care for the soundscapes it preserves, which may encourage o
More from Wind Is the Original Radio
The Earth's orbit around the sound finds itself at the point where we, from our planet, measure the sun's relative location exactly above the Equator's, making its way South. This marks the autumnal equinox in the Northern Hemisphere and the vernal equinox and the beginning of spring in the Southern Hemisphere.
Solstice comes from the Latin solstitium - sol (sun) and sistere (to stand still): the moment when the sun appears to pause in its movement. A brief illusion of stillness. The longest day, the fullest expansion of light, and yet, from this very point, transformation has already begun. The brightest moment already carries the beginning of its own disappearance. Gathering recordings captured during different solstices, across distant places and years, this mix follows movements of appearance, disappearance, and return. Each recording holds a specific moment of listening, a fragment of a landscape that has already changed, a trace of something that cannot happen twice in the same way. Some recordings have been split and reintroduced at different moments, creating small cycles inside the composition. They disappear and resurface, carrying the memory of their previous occurrence while being transformed by their new surroundings. Like seasons, tides, or the movement of light, repetition becomes a way of sensing change rather than sameness. Different environments slowly orbit around each other: distant temporalities briefly aligning, moments of stillness revealing movement, and sounds returning as reminders that nothing ever truly stands still.
Welcome to the wind is the original radio podcast!
This hour long mix comprises of field recordings made on and around Spring Equinoxes of various years. It takes you down through the Northern Hemisphere – from my sitting room in East London to a cottage balcony in the tropical forests of Borneo. Listen for Slovenian jackals, Polish moor frogs, a Himalayan shepherd herding sheep, a hippopotamus getting ready for the night in Sierra Leone and choirs of birds singing across the globe.
We are delighted to share a special set by artist Asa 808, a 2-hour journey ideal to softly immersive oneself in the nature sounds, instruments and spoken word.