Lasse-Marc Riek - Habitats
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Label: 3LEAVES
Year: 2010
Format: CD
“Habitats” was recorded By Lasse-Marc Riek while in Finland in spring of 2007. The beginning of “Habitats” is narrated by Lasse-Marc. He explains that the record deals with habitats, areas and living spaces. The piece, he continues, researchers the interplay between natural elements on the one hand and passages he had arranged at a later stage. It deals with the directional hearing, a vast array of bird voices and the silence between these sounds.
The recording is divided into short segments of around five minutes, giving the listener enough time to let the ambience sink in and take hold. The formative early sounds in “Habitats” centre around water, a theme that will be the dominant backdrop in the final half of the record.
Already during the first few minutes we are intorduced to the Larus canus, better known as the common gull. The sounds of the different types of birds reflect the different spaces that Lasse-Marc Riek have explored through his recordings. The variation in the types of birds we hear are not only to seek out the ornithologst in the listener, but it more or less defines the atmosphere of that given part of the recording. Being the most clear sound in the recording, the different bird sounds thus rightly so seek out the centre of attention, and when abscent, as in the third part of the record, this absence is quite noticeable; even more so thanks to the annoying sounds of insects that own those few minutes of the “Habitat”.
“Habitat” is not so much a guided path of field recordings, but a path through the sonorities of birds. The intro and outro of the record could have been cut shorter or dropped all together, but all in all the sounds of the Finnish forests during spring time is a most refreshing theme that Lasse-Marc Riek does well in capturing. Even the annoying sound of the hover flies.
“Habitats” is released on 3LEAVES
