An Interview with MC Gringo

Another Maga Bo mini-documentary. An interview with MC Gringo, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2008.

Jana Winderen

I found Jana Winderen via the description of a field trip to Holystone Forest, Northumberland, England she made with Chris Watson to record woodland ambiences (as well as the ants in the earlier post). A fellow sound recordist, sound artist, performer, radio producer, curator and director, she has some amazing and detailed accounts of other sound gathering missions around the world with text and photos (as well as info on all of her other projects). Field Trips/Sounds.
She writes, "You can listen to hydrophone recording from briksdalsbreen calving uder water here (please note that the MP3 compression destorts the file)." ....a glacier at Briksdalsbreen....There are a number of links to other recordings with hydrophones as well.

To answer your comment, Dave........Well, on the ant recording, they used DolphinEAR Hydrophones (although it wasn't underwater). Here's the site for that mic.

The manufacturer says "DolphinEar/PRO may be buried in earth, or sand, for use as a geophone-type microphone. It is also suitable for direct immersion into many hazardous chemical solutions." Hardcore microphones....yep. In other recordings (available on his site), Chris Watson uses a variety of other mics - parabolic mic, a single point stereo Shure mic, a Sennheiser MKH60 and others.

There is another recording of his, "adult cheetah resting in a baobab tree," is a mystery to me (sorry it's only 128! Big up to Grrrt who gave this to me originally!). I imagine that he found out that the leopard was accustomed to lounge in this certain tree. Ahead of time, he wired up a small mic (such as Countryman B6, which is the size of a matchstick head) with a wireless transmitter attached to the tree and then waited. When the leopard showed up, got comfortable and got into its groove purring, Chris was recording already.....

The Guardian article says, "We listen to a recording from Kenya, of vultures consuming a zebra killed by lions. By tying tiny microphones to the ribs and disguising the cables, Watson takes us right inside the animal. It's a mildly horrifying mix of screaming, pecking, flesh ripping and flies buzzing. "I told some schoolkids that this was the last thing they would hear were they to be eaten alive by vultures. As a joke." He laughs - then reveals how three of them burst into tears."

Chris Watson

"Watson is one of the world's leading recorders of wildlife and natural phenomena, and here he edits his field recordings into a filmic narrative. The unearthly groaning of ice in an Icelandic glacier is a classic example of, in Watson's words, putting a microphone where you can't put your ears."

Holystone Forest, Northumberland, England
Chris Watson & Jana Winderen with Mike Harding. Sounds of an ant nest recorded by Jana. Very nice photos and tech details of recording.
Chris Watson in Iceland, 2007.

A recording from Ouarzazate, Morocco, "The fall had ruptured his spleen. It took the Land Rover nearly seven hours to reach the George lV hotel, they were desperate, but to late... The feast took place and later the musicians played on the very roof where Nickifi had last spoken to the traitor Dris before he was murdered by the daughters of The Magrha. Friday 13th Sept. 1996. Ouarzazate, Morocco."