Justin Bennett - Cityscape
(Staalplaat STCD 121, 1997)
"Cityscape is a project by Justin Bennett investigating the sonic spaces and rhythms of cities. This CD was made from field recordings made between 1993 and 1996." Bennett has taken recordings of several cities -- The Hague, Paris, Rotterdam, Lisbon, Hamburg, Tangiers, Amsterdam, Fes, Münster, Prague -- and run them all together into one long travelogue. Except the sounds don't really give away the locations: there are nondescript bangings and traffic, some birds, a little talking and a lot of fairly quiet sections. If the "rhythms of the city" differ substantially between Paris and, say Tangiers, it is not readily apparent. Because the CD includes fairly long stretches where not much is happening, this is one of the rare Urban Soundscapes which can function as background music.

Janet Cardiff - A Large Slow River
(Oakville Galleries, no #, 2001)
Cardiff is a grant-supported Canadian artist who does sound installations featuring soundwalks. This beautifully-produced booklet + CD recorded in binaural sound features a fictional mystery inside her narrated walking tour of a lake in Ontario. Part soundscape, part fiction, part picturebook -- at only 18 minutes it's quite short, but very immersive.
http://www.abbeymedia.com/Janweb/

Peter Cusack - Your Favourite London Sounds
(LMC RESFLS1CD, 2001)
Originally produced for the Resonance FM radio program in 1998, this CD presents 40 short recordings (ranging from 25 seconds to just under 6 minutes) of Big Ben, the Underground, a busy London bagel shop, a couple markets, multicultural street scenes, trolley busses, trains and so forth. No attempt is made toward any kind of narrative connection, but the sounds - chosen by Londoners themselves -- are a good deal more evocative than any tourist brochure could be.
http://www.kunstradio.at/BIOS/cusackbio.html

David Dunn - Angels and Insects
(¿What Next? Recordings WN009, 1992)
Like Basil Kirchin, David Dunn manipulates voices (track 1) and insect sounds (track 2) into long, droning, barely recognizable Musique Concréte.

Steven Feld - Rainforest Soundwalks
(Earth/Ear ee1062, 2001)
Jungle recordings from Bosavi, Papua New Guinea. Four 15-min "ambient soundwalks" take you through dense undergrowth, past a gentle stream to a watering hole on the plain. Fascinating and very characteristic.

Doug Haire - Nineteen American Waysides
(CDR, 2002)
"Nineteen American Waysides" consists of twelve tracks - seven of them containing two location recordings - from such desolate out-of-the-way places as East Flat Rock NC and Roundup MT. Birds, crickets, long-haul trucks passing without stopping, sprinklers, cheesy roadside cafes and various nonspecific low hums are combined with some subtle electronic processing, but mostly they're pretty straight-forward soundscapes of places you wouldn't care to visit - even after hearing them.

Ruth Happel - Loons of Echo Pond
(Wild Sanctuary WSC-1508, 1992)
It takes almost 13 minutes before the first loon call appears, during which we are treated to herons, ducks, woodpeckers, grouse, toads, bullfrogs, crickets, flying insects and many other species. Midway through a short rainshower interrupts, after which pond life quickly returns to normal. This is justifiably one of the most famous soundscapes on the market.

Lacroix Härtel - Personalis Aquisgrani
(NO-NOte 001, 1994)
As I understand it from the somewhat opaque liner notes, Peter Lacroix and Günter Härtel used the Kabala (ancient Jewish text) to derive geometic figures based on their own personalities. These figures were then superimposed on a map of Aachen, Germany and live recordings were taken at each of the points of the figure. In other words, a rather random portrait of the city, which includes traffic, vendors, a couple churches with services underway, and various street scenes. Although the individual recordings are rather short, they're mixed together into one 65-minute collage. Alternately fascinating.

Holger Hiller - Little Present
(no label or number)
This CD is exactly what it states on the cover: "At the time my son was living in Tokyo and this is the story of one of my various trips visiting him." It is narrated (in heavily-accented English) by a Japanese woman, and consists of numerous live recordings made all over Tokyo -- street recordings in the shopping district, commercials and soap operas off TV, a Japanese song his son sings to him, airport, train station and subway recordings, misc. talking, background music, telephone conversations, etc. The recordings are short, very characteristic and jumbled together, creating a kaleidoscopic portrait of Japan circa 1995. Hiller, being an electronica musician from Germany, also loops and remixes the sounds (along with drumbox & synths) into 13 musical compositions interspersed seamlessly throughout the story. It works, both as an artistic statement and as a kind of psychedelic soundscape of Tokyo.

Takao Iba - Earthquake Train Announcements
(downloadable from http://www.lib.kobe-u.ac.jp/directory/eqb/audio/iba/english/sound.save.html)
This CD is exactly what it states on the cover: "At the time my son was living in Tokyo and this is the story of one of my various trips visiting him." It is narrated (in heavily-accented English) by a Japanese woman, and consists of numerous live recordings made all over Tokyo -- street recordings in the shopping district, commercials and soap operas off TV, a Japanese song his son sings to him, airport, train station and subway recordings, misc. talking, background music, telephone conversations, etc. The recordings are short, very characteristic and jumbled together, creating a kaleidoscopic portrait of Japan circa 1995. Hiller, being an electronica musician from Germany, also loops and remixes the sounds (along with drumbox & synths) into 13 musical compositions interspersed seamlessly throughout the story. It works, both as an artistic statement and as a kind of psychedelic soundscape of Tokyo.

Takao Iba - Kobe Soundscenes
(downloadable from http://www.lib.kobe-u.ac.jp/directory/eqb/audio/iba1996/english/sound.html)
Thirty-four soundscapes -- two CDs' worth -- of the Kobe zoo, religious festivals, Dixieland marching bands(!), bus tours, Bullet Trains, nature sounds, a ship christening, sports events and many more. A veritable audio diary of 1996 in Kobe.

Jakko M. Jakszyk - The Road to Ballina
(Resurgence RES17CD, 1997)
Commissioned by BBC Radio 3 in December 1995, this CD tells the story of Jakko Jakszyk's search for his birth parents, and what he found.
Adopted at 18 months, raised in England by a French mother and Polish father, Jakszyk found himself searching for his roots at age 24. His adoptive parents were both touched by tragedy in WWII, and their stories, told in imaginatively edited interviews and the accompanying booklet, are heartbreaking. Jakko's search eventually leads him to his Irish birth mother (living in Arkansas), and HER story is similarly stirring.
The spoken word excerpts are combined with sound effects and soundscapes recorded on-site in Poland, Ireland, Germany, France and England. These are then fitted into a musical score of synthesizers, guitar, flute (all by Jakko), plus bass, cello, trumpet and saxophones by guest musicians. The musical themes interweave with the narration, sometimes picking up the rhythms of the speech (similar to what American composer Scott Johnson has done) and the rest of the time providing a simple but haunting framework. The spoken material is treated like any other element of the composition, with judicious looping, repeating themes, and a documentarian's sense of pace. Jakko himself ties together the stories with a few carefully-chosen memories of growing up. The result is a movie-for-your-ears, deep and powerful; and to my knowledge something completely unique in the world of music.

David Lumsdaine - Lake Emu/River Red Gums and Black Box
(Tall Poppies TP092, 1996)
Australian composer and soundscapist David Lumsdaine, now living in York, has a number of contemporary classical albums out (according to the website below), but I knew him first as an excellent soundscapist. A man of many talents, he also founded and directed the Electronic Music Studio in Durham U.K., and taught at Leed's College in London. On this CD a wide variety of wildlife -- exotic birds seemingly unique to New South Wales, frogs, crickets, other insects - were recorded at sunrise, sunset, midnight and the hours in between. It includes 10 tracks which basically play continuously, and these soundscapes have a really strong sense of place. No place else on earth sounds like this!
http://www.amcoz.com.au/comp/l/dlumsdn.htm

Michael Oster - Suburban Thunder
(F7 Sound, 1999)
Oster is a professional sound engineer in Tampa FL, so when a particularly nasty electrical storm blew through town in August 1998 he was lucky enough to have a DAT on hand. Unlike most (or perhaps ALL) other thunder recordings, this is unedited and unimproved, captured exactly as it happened. And this storm was the real magilla -- a huge, angry, fire-breathing monster sure to scare pets, little children and primitive men. One of the best thunderstorm CDs available.

Marcelo Radulovich - [Case of the Missing] Thumb
(Accretions alp023, 2001)
Oliver Sacks describes the strange case of a man named Virgil, who after a lifetime of blindness had his sight surgically restored. Unfortunately Virgil proved unable to process the unfamiliar flood of colors and shapes, and never learned to interpret these strange sensations as a representation of the world around him. Marcelo's "Thumb" is perhaps a similar portrait in the audio realm. Disconnected voices, processed ambient sounds (airplanes, telephones, industrial noises, birds, water dripping, etc.) and isolated snippets of musical instruments are all jumbled together into one continuous collage of kaleidoscopic range and depth, but absolutely no context. It's as if we're hearing the world for the first time, like a newborn -- endlessly fascinating.
http://www.marceloradulovich.com/

Michael Rüsenberg - Kölner Brücken Sinfonie
(Noteworks NW 5102, 2000)
The "Cologne Bridges Symphony" is a series of portraits of steel bridges across the Rhine which carry trains and/or automobile traffic. As is Rüsenberg's style, the recordings are heavily reworked into an evolving cacophony, at times sounding more like Robert Rich or Lustmord than field recordings.

Jarra Schirris - Sama' I
(and/OAR and/3, 2002)
A recording of the Malaysian rainforest at dusk, just as a sopping tropical rainstorm blows through. Primeval and verdant.

The Vancouver Soundscape 1973 / Soundscape Vancouver 1996
(Cambridge Street Records CSR-9710, 1997)
A unique 2-CD set, documenting the sonic environment around Vancouver BC at two points in time nearly 25 years apart. The first disc contains excerpts from the double LP set of the same name produced by R. Murray Schafer and his World Soundscape Project. Nine tracks of ferry horns, ocean sounds, seaplanes, squeaky doors, local music and talking, ranging from 3 minutes to 8-1/2, plus a 20-minute speech by Schafer on acoustic design. Recordists were Howard Broomfield, Bruce Davis, Peter Huse and Colin Miles. The 1996 disc includes a more recent harbor ambience, plus the soundtrack to a documentary about blindness, several manipulated soundscapes, and another talk (12') on how the soundscape has changed. Recordists on the 1996 collection are Barry Truax, Hildegard Westerkamp, Claude Schryer, Hans Ulrich Werner, Sabine Breitsameter and Darren Copeland. This set is more "about soundscapes" than actually "being one," but it is fascinating and meaty nonetheless.

Chris Watson - Stepping Into The Dark
(Touch To:27, 1996)
Former Cabaret Voltaire and Hafler Trio member turned nature recordist. Included here are a dozen short (3' to 5') desolate environments, ranging from the windswept slopes of Scotland to a Kenyan river at dawn. Although nicely recorded, they could have been longer for my tastes.

Chris Watson - Outside The Circle of Fire
(Touch To:37, 1998)
If the first Watson CD was hampered by including too many short tracks, this second is even worse. There are twenty-two unrelated tracks (with breaks in-between), ranging in length from a few seconds to a few minutes. These could almost be considered "sound effects" CDs rather than "soundscapes," although the subject matter -- cheetahs snoring, vultures, hippopotamuses, hyenas -- are consistently riveting.
http://www.chriswatson.net/

Aaron & Bronwyn Ximm - Annapurna: Memories in Sound
(Quiet American CDR)
When travelling abroad most people would take a camera -- Aaron also brings a DAT. The audio snapshots of his Nepali honeymoon include musicians, children, birds, wind, rain, rivers, prayer flags flapping in the breeze and hundreds of other small things. All these Aaron collaged together into a 38-minute evolving soundscape, later narrated by Bronwyn: "I remember the recurring sounds of bells from the donkey trains..." and then, like magic, there the sound is. On headphones you can almost imagine yourself there. "People ask us if trekking was hard, if travelling in general is hard. The hardest thing is remembering what you experience." Having your memories preserved in sound certainly helps.
http://www.quietamerican.org/

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