Part 1

Name: Evan Lindorff-Ellery
Occupation: Sound artist, visual artist, organizer/curator, gardener
Nationality: American
Recent release: Evan Lindorff-Ellery's Church Recordings from Monhegan is out via Full Spectrum.

If you enjoyed this Evan Lindorff-Ellery interview would like to find out more about his work, visit his official website. He is also on Soundcloud, Instagram, Facebook, and bandcamp.



When did you first start getting interested in field recordings?  

I recall making field recordings of domestic situations with my cassette recorder and minidisc recorder around 2005 or so.

The first Notice Recordings “release” (the record label I co-run) from 2009 (oddly catalogued as NTR005—don’t ask me why) was a collage of field recordings I took of activities inside and outside of my grandparents’ house during the wintertime.

Which artists, approaches, albums or performances using field recordings captured your imagination in the beginning?

John Cage, Kiyoshi Mizutani, Annea Lockwood, Jez Riley French, Chris Watson, Anne Guthrie, Malcolm Goldstein, Charles Ives.

An interest in field recordings can often be part of a deeper engagement with sound. Can you talk a bit about your interest in or fascination for sound, the effect it has on you?

Often when it comes to sound and more avant-garde music, I am less interested in work that speaks loudly to me in a narrative or conceptual way. As much as I value other artists creating work within a, perhaps, political, emotional, or social context, I often find myself listening to work that is void of such context. I am content with a sound existing intrinsically as what it “is”, without carrying any other baggage.

I am interested in listening to multiple sound sources and being cognizant of where they exist at a point of convergence, whether at my ears or at the recorder. These are ideas written about by John Cage (and others), but Cage’s conveyance of them immediately resonated with me.

I am interested in documenting the interactions of interior and exterior, and my audible position as a listener and activator in the environments.

Working predominantly with field recordings and sound can be a very incisive step / transition. Aside from musical considerations, there can also be personal motivations for looking for alternatives. Was this the case for you, and if so, in which way?

It is integral to my existence in my moving atmosphere (the atmosphere I carry with me), society, community, my perception of my surroundings, and the maintenance of my sanity.

How would you describe what happens when you start attentively listening to field recordings?

It is a needed respite from sounds that are organized within a musical or tonal context.

What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to music and art?

Texture, catharsis, nature, shape, form, timbre, color, ambiguity.

As creative goals and technical abilities change, so does the need for different tools of expression, from instruments via software tools and recording equipment. Can you describe this path for you personally starting from your first studio/first instruments and equipment? What motivated some of the choices you made in terms of instruments/tools/equipment over the years?

I’ve never had a studio or used gear in any kind of professional way. When I first started recording, I did so with Travis Bird, with whom I started my record label Notice Recordings in 2009, and the recordings were mostly for our project Dense Reduction, which generated a few releases and with which we gigged around Chicago.



Although we utilized field recordings in our process, it was definitely not centered on field recordings. I didn’t know much about recording to a computer (I still don’t). We just plugged various devices and sound sources such as minidisc recordings, radio, 4-track tape experiments, a contact-miked ceiling fan, a microphone in the freezer or hanging out the window, Travis’ synth and guitar, etc, into my mixer, leaving open a channel or two for patched internal feedback. I would often just output the mixer with RCA cables directly into a 2 track stereo component tape player. The live, improvised, and transitory document of a given session interested me more than a careful multi-tracked creation of a labored-over sound work. I rarely used pedals—occasionally I’d use a looping pedal and then later on a pitch shifter, but that’s it.

Now, and I realize this may make some folks cringe, I record a lot of my field and at-home work with my iPhone, as I have been interested in its lo-fi characteristics and weird, unpredictable compression tendencies. I recorded all the pieces on Water Recordings from the Hudson Valley 2020-2021 (Grisaille, 2021) on my iPhone, which presents direct documents of my performances with rocks and resonant objects while standing or submerged in rivers.



I often like to play back my own field recordings or even documents of my past “performances” simultaneously while recording a new performance or field recording; on Water Recordings, one example exists of this. “Swimming In A Pool In Accord With Pebble Performance From Saw Kill Playing”, is literally just that: I have one iPhone recording me swimming in a pool in the countryside, while another iPhone in proximity plays a recording of me agitating pebbles in very shallow water at a river’s edge from a few days prior. (It’s beautiful how water alters the variable resonance of rocks.)

I realize a lot of these approaches are lo-fi and perhaps undesirable for some listeners. But I enjoy how they sound, so I am content with them thus far.

What are the spaces/places/sound sources that you find yourself most drawn to?

Rivers (moving water in nature in general), insects, documenting the act of listening to recorded music, the seemingly incongruent interaction of human-created sounds amidst an aural pillow of natural sounds: Distant construction married with crickets, pop music from a gas station while it is raining, the tapping of a computer keyboard next to an open window with evening birdsong and someone doing the dishes in the next room over.

For instance, while writing the answers to this interview, I have been sitting next to an open window with my phone recording for the whole time, on the windowsill. It has been raining and I can hear distant thunder, boomy bass music from the park a few streets away, a distant train horn, and car doors opening and closing. The room is fairly quiet, but my empty seltzer cans have occasionally emitted subtle fizzles and pops within their metal chambers, and I am so close to the microphone that it probably also picks up my own breath.

Can you take me through the process of realising a field recording on the basis of a project or album that's particularly dear to you?

I was just going to write about this in the answer above, but it seems more fitting here. During early pandemic, I was interested in the emptiness of our outdoor urban environments. This was at a time when people were still very afraid of even going outside and interacting with others for very long.

Since I almost always have my house and bedroom windows open, as I slept, I noticed this quietness. Living in cities and large towns for most of my recent life (despite having grown up in Vermont and having a deep relationship with nature), I lay in bed noticing how I didn’t hear cars driving by, and I didn’t hear distant music or people yelling or talking on the streets, as is common.

The pandemic was a very creative time for me, and I felt lucid and my life was well-paced, despite the intensity. I noticed my breath a lot. So I decided to document my own sleeping, my own breath, and since the recorder was always placed on the windowsill, these interior and body sounds would merge with the exterior and nature sounds. Listening back on this collection of 5-9 hour recordings of my own sleep experience, I noticed, again, the emptiness of the outdoors: a single car driving by, one door closing, etc.

During the spring and summer months, I loved hearing how the animal and nature sounds changed over the course of many hours, documented on the recording. As many people noticed, nature seemed more “present” during the pandemic. (Maybe it was.) In my recordings, I would notice how the tree frogs transitioned to insect sounds (crickets, cicadas, katydids, etc) at a certain point in the night, hearing brief rain storms emerge and dissipate, subtle wind, the rustling of an animal in our vegetated backyard, and finally the beautiful sound of morningtime birds around 4AM.

Consistently I would notice the steady sound of my own breath, the shifting of bedsheets, often obscured by the sounds outdoors or just the high noise floor of the recorder, which added a simultaneously calming and unnerving humanness to the recordings.

I still make these sleeping recordings occasionally, in 2023, and the act of starting the recording before I go to sleep is actually comforting for me, and it often helps me fall asleep. I lie in bed, content that I am making art even while sleeping, and the act of listening to all the sounds which I know are landing on this vast document of sound is stimulating in a sense, but not in a way that keeps me awake. As I notice the sounds, they become more amorphous and abstract, and I eventually fall asleep.

What are some of your considerations with regards to the artistic qualities of a recording?

I may not be understanding the question correctly, but for a while I was off-put by certain sounds in field recordings like coughing, sniffling, clearing of the throat, chewing, very loud abrupt sounds, etc. But I have more of a tolerance of this now, I suppose, and sometimes it adds a strange layer.

I have a few field recordings of the Tennessee wilderness, while I was camping in a Wildlife Management Area. I parked my truck off the side of a dirt road on a slab of rock, and set up a tent. I recorded for quite a while, and one can hear the beautiful and insane sounds of Tennessee insects, strange nighttime birds (I think), but also the scuffling of my boots on the gravel, the sound of me clearing my throat and spitting, peeing, closing the truck doors, getting equipment, etc.

I think that as I am writing this, I should emphasize that I’m often not taking “field recordings” but instead documenting myself in the “field”. I understand that most people wouldn’t want to hear those things in a field recording, but I’ve embraced it and ultimately have enjoyed hearing those elements. That said, if I were to sit down and listen to a great Jana Winderen field recording (I’ve never heard a Winderen recording I don’t like), and all of a sudden I heard those types of human sounds, I would be off-put. So, who knows. It is what it is.



I think the lo-fi, unprofessional characteristics of my recordings perhaps allow for such otherwise “unwanted” sounds. These exist a lot in my at-home recorded free improvisations on objects and percussion and such. I’ll often just get up and walk off while recording, keep the recorder running, come back, and start playing again.

For what it’s worth, I feel like I would have enough discretion to omit such sounds if it didn’t work aesthetically within the recording.