I have always been fascinated by richness of environmental sounds. After years of using heavily processed environmental sounds (to the point where they are no longer recognizable) as the sonic basis for many of my works I decided to compose a piece using only unprocessed (although cleaned up) environmental sounds. As a thread to tie these sounds which I’ve collected for almost thirty years together I decided to use those sounds which wake me or keep me awake nights. Of interest to me is how some sounds seem to stay in the background and others become unnaturally present in the darkness. I’ve emphasized these perceptual anomalies, as well as exaggerated the spatialization in this work. The piece is intended to played over speakers, but listening in headphones will make the spatial and proximity effects even more apparent. I recorded all but one sound myself — I could not resist putting in one “baa” from the cloned sheep, Dolly.

Some of the recordings I used for this piece were made as far back as 1972. Wanting to make technically better quality recordings of some of these early soures, I went back to the same source locations I had used before. I most often found them to now be intolerably noisy. The increased air traffic, freeway traffic, and human intrusion on what were once quiet locations made it impossible to capture clean sounds: the bird menagerie was filled with air traffic and the airplanes had so much air traffic and cars so constant it was difficult to isolate the sounds. Everything was difficult to record cleanly and it took an enormous amount of editing and cleaning up of the background noise to make the location recordings usable. In many instances I ended up using the original recordings.

[source: maggipayne.com]