Rainforest Soundwalks

Ten years after his groundbreaking Voices of the Rainforest (Ryko/The World) became one of the best-selling CDs in the history of both environmental sound and traditional world music, Steven Feld returns with this long-awaited purely environmental sound follow-up. With stunning depth of field and gradually shifting sonic focus, it’s a sublime blend of pure natural voices, subtle studio mixing, and rich spirit.

Feld offers four distinct audio immersions that explore the ways that the voice of the forest changes during the course of a day. From a pre-dawn butcherbird solo of extraordinary virtuosity (which the liner notes reveal was perhaps a message from a departed friend), through a mid-morning soundscape highlighted by the rhythmic maraca-like rattling of cicada, to an evening ambience of ringing insects and frogs, the sound worlds conjured by Feld draw us into the acoustic ecology of the Bosavi forest with unprecedented depth and clarity.

This CD offers a fascinating blend of documentary and sound art, as Feld shapes his academic studies of the anthropology of sound into a subtle composition that becomes an echo of the magic that's kept him coming back to his Bosavi home for a quarter century. Two to four stereo recordings are layered in subtle ways to forge a slowly shifting panorama of sound. By centering the pieces on quieter times of day, when individual voices can be more easily heard, Feld highlights the never-ceasing interplay between birds, insects, amphibians, and the lush vegetation that the local people so poetically experience as the "lift-up-over sounding" of the forest itself.