In part 1, I described how we began our business and recorded our first album. For our next project, we were unsure of how to proceed…

Enter a good friend, Steve Craig. Steve worked for the Department of Conservation, but his passion was owls, particularly the rare Powerful Owls that live in the moist forests around Melbourne. He would track down a breeding pair, find their nesting hollow up to 60 metres up a high eucalypt, and using a steel-rope ladder, climb up to weigh and measure the owl chicks (It is one of his photos of a Powerful Owl that is on the back of the ‘Evening in the Australian Bush’ CD booklet).

He told us not only of his beloved owls, but of his adventures capturing yellow-bellied gliders for documentary film makers to photograph. And he played us recordings; the sound of gliders calling in flight was the wildest thing we’d heard! So the Gippsland forests became our next focus, a decision supported by the awareness that they were (and still are) the site of appalling clearfell logging practices.

So that’s how we came to be sheltering in our tent, as gale-force winds whipped the forest that day – wondering whether we would be granted a future at all! We had many beautiful recordings, but we hadn’t decided what to do with them. So we began debating whether our next album should be another with music, or whether featuring pure nature sounds could be viable. We wrote down the pros and cons for both, and on paper it was a no-brainer; stick with the music. Yet our experience was telling us that with music, nature sounds become relegated as ‘atmospheric background’ for most listeners, and we wanted to let nature speak for itself. The music was a distraction – it had to go.

Thus ‘Tall Forest‘, our first purely nature sound CD, was conceived.

‘Tall Forest’- album sample by Listening Earth

Once it was published, Sarah and I decided on a make-or-break move; we let go of the small bush cottage we had been renting, packed our lives in our cranky old 4-wheel-drive (no aircon, no power steering…), and set off for what became a year on the road. We travelled the length of Australia’s east coast, selling our CDs from the car, and gathering recordings for new projects.

At the time it was a complete leap of faith; we had only two CDs published, and no idea of our future. Looking back, it is amazing that our fledgling business survived that period at all.

A curious juvenile Cassowary at Lacy Creek, near Mission Beach.
In the background, our old 4-wheel-drive that we lived out of for a year.

In our meetings with prospective retailers, we would occasionally get strange responses to our nature recordings. On one afternoon we visited a ‘new-age’ shop in Byron Bay (what a friend of ours calls a ‘purple shop’). It was run by a woman who had a young assistant on the counter, and were pleased to find them both quite interested. They asked us many questions about how we had recorded ‘Tall Forest’, and the birds and animals we’d encountered. Eventually the owner disappeared ‘out the back’ to organise an order for us, leaving us chatting with the girl on the counter. She seemed as though she wanted to ask us something important, looked at us closely and asked: “When you were in those forests, with all the birds and animals, camping out at night and everything, tell me… did you ever see fairies?” Now what could we say to that? We were lost for a response. A friend later gave us a great reply line: “yes, and if you listen hard enough…”

When we eventually returned home, we had the material for what have become some of our most popular titles; ‘A Morning in the Australian Bush‘ and ‘A Walk in the Rainforest‘. With those CDs published, our business began picking up momentum. We relocated to central Victoria, and began thinking of building a home…

The rest is a story for another day… Looking back, we think it was our faith in what we were doing that kept us going – initially a mixture of naivety and enthusiasm. However we couldn’t have done it without the support of our families, friends, retailers and customers. And of course we probably wouldn’t have even started without each other.

Its curious how life’s threads weave us together in unexpected ways. Recently our friend Steve Craig passed away after a long battle with cancer. We attended his funeral and to honour his love of the bush, his family played our ‘Tall Forest’ CD at the ceremony. Sarah and I were deeply touched, as Steve had played such a role in inspiring us during our early days. The opening sequence of the album had actually been recorded in the forest gully below his house (see pic below). Shortly after the album begins, at 1 minute 57secs into track 1, a juvenile owl can be heard trilling as it follows mum to a daytime roost. For a long time we were all unsure what species we had recorded in the darkness, but a few weeks before Steve died, he finally confirmed that it was indeed a juvenile Powerful Owl.

Tweet

Tags: meditation music, natural sounds, nature CD, nature download, nature music, nature sounds, sounds of nature