Review | By Richard Allen / a closer listen
Sounds of Absence | Various artists
In the coming years, sonologists will continue to be grateful for the work of field recording artists during the pandemic. Guided by curiosity, working for the most part without pay, such artists captured aural time capsules: innumerable hours of raw material in which is encoded vital information about our species and its relationship to the biosphere. On Sounds of Absence, Peter Kiefer, head of Art-Research-Sound at the Mainz Music School, invited artists to submit recordings captured during lockdown, as well as compositions that express their impressions of the period. The result is a potpourri, from empty to packed, immobile to overworked, with an undercurrent of melancholy. []