Review | By textura
David Rothenberg | Nightingale Cities
On Nightingale Cities, clarinetist David Rothenberg expands on the duet approach of his earlier ‘interspecies‘ recordings by including others. To that end, he and like-minded musicians collaborated with nightingales in Berlin and Helsinki over a five-year period, the results documented in this double-CD release (a companion to the recording is Rothenberg’s 2019 book Nightingales in Berlin). One of the best things about this unusual project is that it’s not field recordings-based in the usual sense: a recording of that kind typically sees the artist collecting sounds from the environment and merging them with material, musical or otherwise, generated at a different place and time; in Rothenberg’s case, interactions with nature, in this case nightingales, happen live and are recorded in real-time. (His music projects involving non-human species haven’t centered on birds exclusively, by the way, but also have included ones with whales and bugs.) []