Anton Mobin "Floating Wood"

Anton Mobin - Floating Wood
Green Field Records

Field recordings have been used in many way; as source material to manipulated, as background noise in pop songs, and as documentation of the world around us. Some artists treat the recordings with effects as you would a guitar and some leave it as is with little or no editing. I love phonography in all it’s forms, treated or untreated, and recently I’ve downloaded quite a few good releases from some netlabels using field recordings:

“Sound Journal Edits” - My Fun

“3Nocturns” - 1HOME

“Floating Wood” - Anton Mobin

After hearing, "Tales 4 Tapes" by Anton Mobin/Ayato, I've been downloading and listening to as much A. Mobin's stuff I can find, and there is a lot out there. Most is good, some are mediocre, and a very few are less than interesting but “Floating Wood” is beautiful. It’s mysterious, a bit creepy when some of the animal sounds come in, and a bit calming with the water and rain sounds. I felt like I lost 20 minutes of my life and I didn’t care that I lost that time. When the mbira sound comes in part of the way through I thought this was just another ploy by an artist to get the fringe listener to be engaged in the “new age” nuances of a field recording piece but the familiar instrument tone is the background music to a great or several great pieces of sounds combined.

Mr. Mobin used several different locations for his source materials and a few different mic setups for this too. At the bottom of the little instrumentation and location information for this piece on audioblog.arteradio.com there was a quote that sums up this piece and most of all Mr. Mobin’s work perfectly:

“Calm and surrealist nothing is real in the composition which combines Improvisation & Field Recordings.

"Inner Collapse" - Anton Mobin
Treetrunk

"Tales for Tapes" - Anton Mobin/Ayato
Justnotnormal netlabel