Hearing a Possible World in the Crackling of Dry Leaves

My walking into the woods behind my block of flats with a microphone is an attempt to journey into the wild, to meet it face to face, to feel it and smell it and narrate its natureness. The woods is an imagined and actual wilderness. It helps me think where it starts and where I meet it and how I belong to it. It is where the spiders come from that sit in the corners of my room, where the foxes live that roam the streets at night, where the birds congregate once they have left the feeding tables in the garden, and where my anxiety about dogs off leads gets particularly acute due to the lack of a broad horizon and the imagination of wolfs and bears.

The woods is at once mythical and real, and makes me acutely aware not of nature but of how we exclude it in our definition of being human, how we fence it off on our maps and in our narrations and performances of the wild. In this sense my walking into the woods behind my block of flats, listening to it through a microphone and on headphones is an auto-ethnographic journey as wilding: wilding myself, testing my nature rather than that of the woods.

The intractable body and a natural anechoic chamber.
Walking in a dusty desert gorge in northern Chile became an unexpected exercise in finding the edges of my sonic body, the limits of my tolerance for hearing it, and my expectations for my relationship with my wild environment.

Every tiny little thing I do is loud - my breathing, swallowing, clothes rustling, feet hitting the dirt. I am an annoyingly noisy thing to have to listen to, and it's all that I can hear. So I stop moving, and my breathing slows, but there is very little else to listen to. So I strain to hear my surroundings - but I just hear pressure. A ringing then begins. My tinnitus is a low humming and a high-pitched hiss, the kind of sound that I would edit out of a field recording. This also becomes too much.
I get up and move. I move to make sound, to hear things. I kick the ground, drag my feet across its different surfaces, I throw things, break and damage the ground around me so that I can hear it.

This recourse to the auto-ethnographic is my way of dealing with the confusion of the post-anthropocentric. It performs my doubt about how I can be with nature without dominating it, and without it dismantling my humanness, acknowledging that we inter-are in a co-dependent embrace, while knowing also that I can only be with it as myself - not as me only but as only me; as an uncertain sonic texture and pattern walking between the brambles, cutting my flesh and making a path of walked on fruits. This is the conundrum of this sonic wilding: it aims to describe a wholesome giving space to nature, but becomes a marauding act that terrorizes its strangeness from the desire to be it, through recording and grasping what it is, making a sonic rhythm but no roots.

This quiet location presented a different sonic balance that I was not used to hearing. The environment was barely audible, while the sounds which were usually at the sonic peripherals of my body were now center stage. These biological sounds of my body were a byproduct of its recording action. They were unwanted. Instead, the sound of the environment was needed and I strained to hear it. But the balance had shifted, the focus of it all had moved.

My kicking movements brought a fleeting rebalance, but unpleasantness and irritation were wrapped up in this re-arrangement of what was and was not audible. These interactions felt destructive, a crossing of a line. I reconsidered a set of expectations about what this encounter would and could be, and an unease had settled in.

moss (audio):

dry leaves (audio):

round hairy plant (audio):

fern (audio):

pine (audio):

holly (audio):

A journey, a breach, and pressing record too early.
Recording idyllic rainforests in Brazil and in Australia - thick with humming insects, birds calling, a space filled with plants, trees, vines, yet wide open all at once - all captured omni directionally via my DPA mics, a sonic moment of “untouched” nature all around. But I was there too, silently, barely breathing, sweating in the heat, sitting next to my microphones. Like a strange voyeur hoping not to be seen. But how did I get there?

It’s a wooden walkway with clomping footsteps and fragments of idle conversation that pass me by.
It’s a metal stairwell and overpass with resonating footsteps and vibrations, with exclamations and shouts coming from it. It’s an earth track, with dull thuds of boots dancing down hill past me in pairs.

And so I trace and retrace nature with an uncertain but self-conscious body that does not feel in charge but terribly responsible, and that as matter makes unstable contacts and unreliable connections that move through the microphone into my headphones and touch the stereocilia, the mechanosensing hair cells, which respond to fluid motion in human and animals and enable hearing and balance. Thistles, dry leaves, grass, and brambles touch the short hair within the spiral of the cochlea close up. We meet as textures and surfaces, hairy, jagged, willful and intractable, and breach a dualistic world view in the encounter of small hairs, fluid, skin, stems and spikes.

Pressing record early, I let my footsteps piece together from fragments, the human built infrastructure and construction as the order and mediation of trails and paths that structure our access to these wilderness areas. The need for control of human traffic is clear, but it serves to protect us too. The hidden journey behind the recording is not one of closeness or contact, but of separation - it is a controlled breach into a wilderness.

The journey sounds out the designated meeting point for me and the wilderness - the paths that lead into it, through it - the human corridor of access for the journey.

But is that wilding me or it, where is the conflict where the solution? What do we end up with, am I now nature, and what of my recordings? I ask as I stare at the bramble crunched up by the microphone and trampled under foot, and the red scratches along my arms and fingers, skin torn, bloody and sore.

To get a distance I bring my 9 year old daughter and ask her to narrate, hoping for a less conflicted voice. Instead of talking she touches leaves, combs through moss, chews on grass and tells me it tastes like hair. She performs being matter together without fear of destruction and hierarchy, and so she half builds, half destroys, bringing organisms together as a host. She also does not fear the dog that runs around the long grass, while I duck and try not to be there. According to the Urban Dictionary, wilding is a non-word.

Half building, half dismantling.
Walking in a mountain in Italy, I brought together my experiences of unease and access.

The uneasy sounds of my intractable body breathing, of me being present were heard alongside nature sounding. I purposefully changed the sonic balance of me and ‘it’ when recording this walk. Pressing record ‘too early’ I captured the journey as well as the destination. The route was not a path but a direction of my choosing, it came with complexities, obstacles and confusion - of getting lost and falling over. This caused an up-closeness of being, of interaction and of contact - tripping, crushing, brushing - and the imaginative possibilities of this performance of matter together.