Frédéric Nogray — BUITI BINAFIN (déambulation à la lisière du monde)
The release is in the form of a CDR that comes in a wonderful full colour cover that takes in a close up & almost naturally psychedelic picture of tangles of weeds with-in water. And the use of water in the cover picture is rather apt, as much of the long form & slightly manipulated field recording composition on offer here utilises water as a key element, be it jungle down pours, water splashing, river drippings, distant sound of rushing or pouring water, or the sound of crashing waves.
The whole piece takes in recordings just from Punta Izopo, a mangrove forest on the north coast of Honduras near the Caribbean Sea. The track starts out in the open with around four minutes of jungle bound rainstorm- mixing together a deluge of rain textures with the distant sound of thunder. At just past the four minute mark we seem to go inside, as the storm sounds are distant & not so close now.
As we near just over the nine minute mark the storm seems to slowly fade to the background & in the end disappear, and then we get a selection of soothing yet vibrate & colourful bird songs, monkey & frog sounds…taking in more tuneful & repetitive calls, with more chattering & random calls. Around the thirteen minute mark you can make either distant rain or the rushing of water, but still at the forefront of the recording is the truly beautiful & sonic map of different bird calls/ animal sounds….it’s both lulling & soothing yet also deeply captivating too. As we near the twenty minute mark we get a mixture of distant bird chatter & call, and sudden sound of water drops/ splashing. As the track goes on Nogray mangers to capture wonderfully the lulling yet complex patterns of bird song mixed with distant or sudden close-up water sounds….no real large sonic events or shifts take place along the next ten or so minutes-it’s just all very subtle shifting of bird song/ small animal recordings & their surrounding environments, which gives one the impression of slowly but silently drifting or floating through the peaceful & tranquil mangrove forest.
Around the thirty minute mark we start to get a few breaks in the lulling drift: the sudden hammering of a wood pecker, a hand in water, the amassed searing buzzing of insects, and the constant honking chatter of monkeys or birds- as each element appears then disappears there’s a feeling of building tension with-in the track. At around the forty seven minute mark we get the first clear sounds of mankind with the sound of a outboard motor & crashing wave sounds, from here on you get the odd dart of animal sound, but mostly you seem to drift further & further away from the lulling yet subtle complex sonic feel of the forest.
BUITI BINAFIN (déambulation à la lisière du monde) is a wonderfully recorded and subtle minpliated long form piece of field recording composition that captures perfectly both the beautiful soothing yet detail sonic wonder of this most amazing environment, and the building tension with-in it from mankind & his impingement on it.