'Night Swimmer': out soon on the Unfathomless label

‘Night Swimmer’ is created from field-recordings of nocturnal swims and paddles made during the summer of 2013 in Ontario’s Georgian Bay. As evening would fade into night, the athropophony and biophony tended to become muted; this resulted in a significantly increased signal to noise ratio, or what acoustic ecologist R Murray Schafer describes as a transformation into a ‘hi-fi environment’. This expanded sonic horizon – coupled with a reduced amount of visual information – encouraged a heightened focus on the act of listening: the manner in which landscape filters and reflects sound became significantly more perceptible and I often found myself in an acousmatic space in which most of what was heard could not actually be seen. In this intensified state of acoustic awareness, one can perhaps detect a more primal way of responding to our environment, an echo of a past that predates the primacy of the visual.