A hopeful rewilding

As a lockdown musician I stopped making music entirely at first, feeling demotivated and uninspired. The newly unfolding online musical environment offered little personal comfort and so I lost myself in supporting family, reading, looking and listening while the landscape around me unfurled from its own, centuries-old human lockdown…

Inspired by the pioneering soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause who explores the impacts of soundscapes on ecosystems, Rewindwild is a personal exploration into the sounds revealed by lockdown and how we might listen and respond to ‘noise’ returning to the Lake District. In a hopeful rewilding of instrumental and found sound projected into a future Lake District landscape, I wanted to explore the environmental and ecological benefits of returning swathes of our countryside back to nature.

I’ve used field recordings from the woods and fields which I’ve spent these past strange months listening to, piecing together an aural picture of my surroundings. I’ve visited the edges of the Lake District National Park at different times of the day and night to see what sounds were there and changing over time, as well as recording areas of higher population noise and some of the most popular tourist spots during lockdown easing. What has followed has been a process of mixing these found sounds together to reconstruct three soundscape elements: geophony (naturally occurring non-biological), biophony (vocalizing animal) and anthropophony (produced by humans) into a new, imagined sonic environment.

In addition to this, contact mics all over the bass clarinet have been used to create complex, a-rhythmic woodland floors and leafy canopies, teeming with life and hidden patterns. Half-pitched wind sounds and articulations using just the top half of the instrument have also been constructed into playful gusts and theatres of air. This imaginary clarinet ‘biophony’ and ‘geophony’ is combined with melodic material (clarinet, bass clarinet and voice) written during the height of the nationwide lockdown which weave a lyric through the piece. My hope is that these elements all combine to create something strange but listenable, an aural rewilding of these wind instruments I relied on to earn a living before the pandemic.

Rewindwild plays out as a quarried cathedral of audio leaving space for the listener to be transported to the intricate, wild, tranquil and vast Lakes-spaces they know, imagine and negate by their ordinary presence.

Rewindwild was commissioned as part of Aerial 2020.
www.aerialfestival.com

Find out more about Rewindwild at www.jackmcneill.co.uk/blog