The Pines

Description

Sound artist and filmmaker Joshua Bonnetta wants to know what happens when a human listener leaves a landscape. How does our presence affect field recording? His ambitious long-form work The Pines I-IV, released by Shelter Press and The Dim Coast, seeks to explore some of these questions by capturing the sonic life of a pine tree in upstate New York over the course of a year through remote recordings. In total, 8,760 hours of sound were captured by a microphone attached to the trunk 3 meters above the ground, then reworked into one hour of sound for each season, each capturing events in and around the tree’s branches and its immediate surroundings. We hear the elements and wildlife, coyotes and owls, the cracking of branches under the weight of snow and ice - all of it acting as a window onto the sound of this place devoid of human beings. This album is released as a 4-CD box set accompanied by an essay by renowned naturalist writer Robert Macfarlane and a foreword by curator Jake Moore, who suggests that the forest knows when it is being listened to.