Patricia Wolf ★★★
The Secret Lives Of Birds
NITE HIVE. DL/MC
Bills Bills Bills: flights of fancy from Portland-based soundscaper.
Birdsong is often the go-to field recording for artists hoping to add a bit of thoughtful pastoral atmosphere to their work, a chirruping shortcut to calmness, contemplation, even hope. Oregon musician and sound designer Patricia Wolf isn’t averse to those moods on The Secret Lives Of Birds, Victoria Segal but her interests in ornithology run deeper than a few cosmetic feathers. Pairing grand electronic murmurations with her recordings of different species, she catches both the untrammelled strangeness of the wild – the disorientating plunge of Rufous Hummingbird Dive Display, the wow and flutter of Nocturnal Migration – and the vulnerability of birds during ecological crisis. Mourning The Varied Thrush That Struck A Window And Died is a sombre elegy, while I Don’t Want To Live In A World Without Birds amplifies tiny voices. It’s like being in a hide: hushed, intimate, and ultimately oddly moving.