On Repeat: Birdsong, Iceberg, Cello

I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I’ll later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.

▰ This is a live performance reworking of sounds from the forest, emphasis on the birdsong, by Mark Harrop, aka UMCorps, based in Cornwall in the U.K. He employs various techniques on “Endless Woodland,” like pitch-shifting as well as the re-insertion of samples from the original material, turning the source audio into something cinematic, a combination of the everyday and the psychological experience of an imagined scenario.

▰ Heejin Jang’s new album, Human Iceberg, is the score to a collaborative project by that name that teams her with writer Lim Jina and visual artist Lee SunHo on what sounds, from the description, like a science fiction fable about climate change. Jang scored the project, expressing various settings, from the melting of an iceberg to technological failures to seemingly supernatural occurrences. While there are atmospheric moments, it gets loud; as Jang says on her Bandcamp page’s bio: “I make something noisy.” More at instagram.com/humaniceberg.official, best viewed on a laptop or desktop computer. Jang is based in Seoul, Korea.

https://heejinjang.bandcamp.com/album/human-iceberg

▰ Henrik Meierkord’s cello, sounding like it’s deep in cavern, combines on “Warum” with the samples and tape work of Marco Lucchi, moaning swells that turn the piece into a sort of conversation between the instruments. Meierkord is based in Sweden, Lucchi in Italy.