Speechification
Wind Turbines
I've been meaning to link to Speechification for a while now. It's a site that was set up by Dan Hill (he of the peerless City of Sound), amongst others, and is essentially an aggregator of all the great podcasts and shows coming out of Radio 4, although it does include other stations. I've found a great wealth of stuff here, and best of all, many of the links are to mp3 recordings of said shows, so you can keep them.
A recent gem was this program on Radio 3 called The Symphony Of The Wind Turbines, which is partly a meditation on the impact of these beguiling structures on the lives and minds of those within sight of their brooding whiteness, and also a series of field recordings of the entrancing sounds they make - the almost subsonic throbbing low hums, the creak of their limbs and internal workings. It makes for oddly spooky listening.
Sky Valley
Back in 2000 I went with friends on an ill-thought out pilgrimage to Sky Valley (Kyuss country), to see if we could find the legendary view from the front cover of the album, and to check out the megalithic presence of the wind turbines we knew to be in the area. We turned off near Palm Springs chasing signs and portents. We finally stopped and asked in a garage. The woman frowned, pointed. The further out into the desert we got, the louder the ambient sound became: the wind was limitless, a fibrous wall; it came off the desert, out of the wide skies. As we got nearer, the windmills appeared like sentinels sprouting from the withered soil in endless ranks, rotating their lazy white arms. Distance was deception, we seemed to get nowhere. Then, we crossed a saddle between two low hills and there was a (but not the) signpost for Sky Valley. As we drove in, the rumour of geography as sound became real and as the sun sunk in front of us, the wind dropped and there was an extraordinary barrage of silence, backgrounded by the slow whoompf of the turbines: an uncanny Lynchian symphony; the sound of dreams.