Waves Breaking On Rocks Along The Northeast Australian Coast (1983)

Ti­tle of the com­pi­la­ti­on/album: Field Recordings of Natural Sounds
Ti­tle: Waves Breaking On Rocks Along The Northeast Australian Coast (Track 06)
Publisher: Sierra Club, San Francisco
Da­te: 1983
Me­di­um: re­cord 30 cm

In this recording, you can hear the waves of the ocean crashing against the rocks of the Australian coast. The recording was made on location by Bill Fontana himself. Along with five other field recordings from the USA and Australia, the piece has been released on the LP Field Recordings Of Natural Sounds by Bill Fontana.

Just as Bill Fontana's sound installations often transfer the sounds of distant landscapes from one place to another, this LP transfers the sounds of landscapes into the listeners' homes. The sound of the ocean on the Australian coast sounds foreign on the one hand and yet familiar on the other. In his work, Fontana makes use of the sound memory of the listeners, because more or less all people are familiar with sounds of the sea in general.

For his recordings on the Australian coast, Fontana used several special microphones. He carefully distorted the sound at the mixing desk to get a wide soundstage and a complex, multi-layered soundscape. For example, some of the sounds in these field recordings seem to come from far away, although they can be heard very clearly. The listener is given an extensive acoustic landscape with an incredible richness of detail to listen to. In this sense, these field recordings sound unique.

_ATJ