Issue #1 - March 2007
Return to newsletter frontpage
The Listening Earth story - how we began.
by Andrew Skeoch
Sarah and I were camped out in the mountain forests of East Gippsland, in far-eastern Victoria. These dense forests are a realm of giant tree ferns, towering eucalypt trees and impenetrable undergrowth. They are places of peace and majesty, of sheltered gullies, birdsong and sunlight-filled mornings. We had been in these high forests for several weeks, and had driven up remote tracks to arrive at a secluded campsite known as Waratah Flat. This was only our second time of recording natural sounds, and for the preceeding few days we had been enjoying a forest full of birdsong.
But now the forest had become anything but peaceful, as a massive storm system was blowing in off the southern ocean. Ferocious winds whipped the crowns of the trees, and clouds scudded low overhead, sometimes enveloping everything in mist, rain or swirls of sleet and snow. Every now and then there would be the sickening groan of a tree branch tearing loose and the heart-stopping crash of it hitting the ground. To attempt to drive out along the miles of forest tracks would have been foolhardy. The forest was being shredded, and we were huddled inside a small tent, waiting for the sound of the next branch to be tortured loose and come crashing down, unable to do anything but sit out the storm.
It seemed an opportune time to consider our future...
But first, let me backtrack a little... Sarah and I met in 1989, and right from the beginning we dreamed of working creatively together. Sarah had studied massage and worked as manager of a handcrafts shop. I was teaching voice and meditation classes, and together we were living in a very cute little mud-brick cottage in the bush outskirts of Melbourne. Eventually we established Listening Earth as our own independent label, with the idea of weaving my interests in music and nature, and Sarah's talent for photography, into a business that could sustain us.
One of our first projects involved recording my music for lute. The lute is a lovely gentle instrument, softer than the guitar in sound, with a history dating back to the European renaissance and beyond. The character of the lute appealed to me, and during bush camping trips I would sit in the shade of a tree writing my own compositions for it. So we eventually conceived the project of recording these compositions in the 'studio' they had been inspired by - the bush itself.
We chose to record at Mootwingee National Park in western New South Wales, an extraordinary landscape that is both a haven for wildlife in the harsh outback, and an ancestral meeting place for aboriginal peoples. (our nature photo gallery from Mootwingee).
We were there for nearly two months; trekking, exploring, photographing, recording the music - and most importantly, discovering the local birdsong and how to record it. I clearly remember one of our first mornings, standing in the semi-darkness of pre-dawn and hearing Spiny-cheeked Honeyeaters calling across the ridgelines. Those beautiful cascading ripples of sound were a revelation to us, I had no idea natural sounds like these existed. We had begun to hear the voices of the bush.
The Mutawintji mob; rangers and aboriginal staff with us at Mootwingee.
And yep, that's a mumified Wedge-tailed Eagle behind us...
We returned home to complete the project, mixing the music and birdsong together, the resulting album being titled 'Rockpool Reflections'. (Whilst this album is not on our website any more, it is nevertheless available. You can listen to some mp3 samples here, including those beautiful Spiny-cheeked Honeyeaters). We began getting it out to the shops ourselves, however the feedback was mixed. Listeners loved it for the gentle music and birdsong. However this was the early 90s, and retailers were viewing it as a 'new-age' album, and we found ourselves being overlooked in favour of mass-selling 'inspired-by-nature, relaxation music' artists. Hence we were unsure about how to proceed for our next project.
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 Australan 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. 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 battered old 4-wheel-drive, and set off for what became a year on the road. We travelled the length of Australia's east coast, selling our CDs and gathering nature 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. Its amazing when we look back that we survived that period, that any shops bought our CDs. Often we would get puzzled responses from retailers; "a CD without any music? - that won't sell!" But fortunately they did, and the re-orders gradually came through. Because we were travelling, Sarah's family volunteered to dispatch orders from their Melbourne home in the evenings. They recall (with mixed feelings!) their dining room table covered in neat piles of CDs ready for packaging. A few retailers were particularly supportive; The Wilderness Society Shops were wonderful, and even the ABC ordered up big, something they would be unlikely to do under today's management. However Australian Geographic were implacably disinterested, an irony considering that our CDs are now among the best-selling titles in their shops.
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.One memorable incident from that time concerns 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. We dropped in without an appointment one afternoon, and were relieved to find them 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, and eventually looked at us closely and quietly asked: "When you were in those forests, with all those 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 comeback line: "yes we did, and if you listen hard enough..."
When we eventually returned, we had the material for what have become our most popular titles; 'A Morning in the Australian Bush' and 'A Walk in the Rainforest'. With those CDs published we 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.
