place, nature, landscape

Image by Dan Morelle

It has been awful quiet in these parts. I'll confess to a certain amount of lassitude certainly, but really life has got in the way in all its prickly forms. Not least a hideous dose of uvula pustules (or tonsillitis to the school nurse) which left me feeling like I had a hedgehog nesting to the north west of my larynx. Not much fun. I did hear this cracking show on Radio 4 whist I was off though - Chris Watson's Search for the Nightingale's Song. He does seem to be everywhere at the moment (the interview in a recent issue of The Wire is really something and it's led me to TC Lethbridge, more of which another time) - and with good reason. His method seems simple and yet there is something close to perfection in his (and his equipment's) output. His recording of the nightingale is a signature occurrence - thorough, rapt and so clear and pure at times as to sound artificial.

A few years ago I was walking down by the River Test near King's Somborne. It was late April and getting very close to the arrival dates for our intake of nightingales. It was humid for April, the air clammy and dense; and one particular field, set just back from the river, was boisteros with bird song, the air full of the criss-crossings of repeating figures of trills and whistles. From what I could make out the bulk of the noise could only have been coming from two or three locations, and despite never having heard nightingales in the field before, I was convinced these had to be them. It was an intense barrage of noise, at times like extended raygun peals, at others like some cracked and slipped motorik - always fading away into a single reedy note before the next barrage began. It wasn't song so much as textile, a swarm of threads knitting the air around me. I was mesmerised.

Unsure of myself however, I spoke to a friend who worked for the RSPB. He was free and suggested we could go back to the same location and clear the matter up for certain. These could be very adroit song thrushes, after all. So back we went. It was some 10 days later and the air had cooled and thinned. The low scrub where I'd heard the singing, still leafless at this stage looked dirtier in the lessening light. There was a heavy silence, punctuated by the occasional blast from a desultory song thrush. A series of weak trills and bleeps - where were the fireworks? I was a little sheepish to say the least, and though we waited for the best part of an hour, nothing appeared. I started to think it must have been an aural hallucination, maybe I'd ingested some ergot? Then he had an idea.

At the time I was driving a Volvo 340, an utterly graceless squashed whale of a car, replete with the turning circle of an arthritic brontosaurus. Indeed so heavy was the steering that the previous owner had affixed one of those snooker ball sized black knobs (hereafter to be called the knob of joy) to the steering wheel to help him get the fucker round car parks and the like. I hadn't removed it. My mate, for his job (so he says) happened to have all four CDs of Jean C. Roche's monumental All the Bird Songs of Britain and Europe ('396 chants en 4 CDs') on his iPod and we figured if we could get the car close enough to the field and play the iPod through the car's (frankly superb) stereo we might be able to lure the birds from whence they may have fled. I pictured us huddled safe inside the car whilst hordes of these light brown beauties danced across the thick metal roof... So there we are, furtively pulling up to a gate, throwing the doors wide open pouring the recorded psychobabble of the nightingale into the milky light of evening. We pause it frequently, partly out of embarrassment, partly to hear if our sonic fiction is having any effect? The air remains shallow of song. We turn it up as loud as we dare - loud enough to scare a fallow deer that had been sheltering in an adjacent field. It must have thought this was the nightingale apocalypse. We try for a full five minutes before shame and bemusement takes hold. Nothing. Not even a rasping blackbird.

I'll never know if they were nightingales buried in that low thorny scrub. Something tells me they were and that maybe they'd been spooked, or were just passing through to other known haunts. Whatever their reasons, they'd flown and to this day I've still not heard a nightingale sing in the wild. Thankfully, I have Chris Watson to listen for me.

Download: Chris Watson - The Hunt for the Nightingale's Song

Posted by poacher in place, nature, landscape at 21:52 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

This wee incident happened a few years ago, but last night walking across a field of young cows the whole incident came back so vividly I thought I'd share it.

I went for a walk in Durley yesterday, which despite its rather dull sounding name is a secret little corner of Hampshire that is almost too perfectly English and beautiful for its own good. William Cobbett called it 'certainly one of the most obscure villages in this whole kingdom'. Obscure in the true sense of hidden, cut off. And then some. With demonic cows.

I'd just emerged from a wooded hillside above the upper reaches of the Hamble River, all marsh and bluebells, into a meadow; I was about halfway across when I noticed that the cows I'd clocked on the way in where running my way, fast. The one in the lead was a young black thing, with a fair set of horns on it, and looked intent on running me down. I did the obvious thing and started backing away but it just kept on coming so I raised my arms and started bellowing at it (all the time, thinking, 'grab its ring'): it pulled up short and just stared at me. Meanwhile the rest of the herd had caught up and were lumbering up, careening into each other, mounting each other, generally looking chaotic. I started to back off and they followed so I charged them, shouting: they'd back off, but one would always resume interest so they just kept getting closer. I turned to identify an escape route and saw a gate behind me that I could leap...

Now, to my mind, cow’s aren’t dangerous as such, they're more just affectless somehow, with a latent, abstract potential for horrible damage. You don't get malice with cows, just a sort of dumb, belligerent interest. But all the while, you do wonder if there isn’t an uprising in there somewhere, all those years of disgusting servitude just bubbling away waiting to boil over. If they wanted too, surely they could; I mean, Christ, that's a ton of animal.

As I backed toward the gate, they just kept coming on in a kind of demonic v-shape: a few at the head most intent, the others drawn on, living the herd mentality. I held my bag above my head and charged one more time (what a warrior: man-bag in hand, screaming like a girl steaming into a docile bovine crowd, hardly William Wallace), then turned and bolted for the gate. I could hear the ground pounding behind me and sensed the hot mineral breath on the back of my neck. I vaulted the gate (yes, vaulted). As I landed there was a great clatter as the head of the pack battered into the gate. As I landed there was a horrible moment when I thought they'd got through, but thankfully they hadn’t - there was just a line of beasts, watching me from behind the gate, now spreading along the line of the fence. Thank god for barbed wire.

I was on a patch of land that was half wet woodland marsh, half farmland. What was immediately obvious was that I couldn’t go down, as it were, because that was flood plain for the river it looked like knee deep bog; to my left was a tangled mess of bog and scrub; right wasn’t an option as it was more bog and scrub and only lead the way I'd come; ahead was a steaming herd of cattle. They were just standing there, gawping, and obviously going nowhere. After sitting on a rock for a bit, mildly panicking, it was obvious that I'd have to go left and try and get through the bog/scrub. It was a torturous affair, all low brambles and ankle deep, sucking mud. All the while the cows were following my progress along the fence, lowing gently. I eventually reached the field boundary and all I needed to negotiate was a fallen tree that was matted with brambles and a barbed wire fence. I was triumphant and started threatening the beasts with all sorts of torments: I was coming back with a gun, with an axe, with a steak knife. As I leapt off the tree into the neighbouring field whooping with a rare kind of joy I gave the entire herd the two fingered salute and turned away.

As I turned away, I noticed that the field I was now in, whilst obviously being adjacent to the one with the cows in, was also more intimately associated. By a gate. That was open. I had an awful moment of realisation, a sort of disbelieving wrenching horror: this was destiny, I was to be made to pay for all the sirloin I'd savaged in the past, all that rump, topside; I was the sacrifice, the burnt offering, to ease the guilt of mankind - this had been ordained, I couldn’t escape. Looking frantically about, I was bound by the river on the left and a dense hawthorn hedge on the right. The opposite side of the field seemed many miles off. Behind there was a diabolic horde thirsty for penitent blood. It was over.

They could see me through the hedge and were trying to get through; noses appearing, feet appearing. As I backed away, they were moving along the boundary hedge, toward the gate, but quite obviously hadn't noticed it, or hadn’t put two and two together that it was a way through... My slow backing off soon turned into a quick stroll, which soon became a frantic scrambling run, uphill towards a distant stile, a beacon of safety. As I ran, wheezing like a consumptive, I'd risk the occasional glance over my shoulder, to see that they were no nearer working out the concept of gate, no nearer. I reached the stile. They hadn’t even got into the field yet. I stood statued on the stile for a bit, watching their progress, still a bit stunned. The sun had become a hanging orange ball by now, and there was a purple, washed look to everything. I felt oddly serene, ecstatic even. I dropped off the stile into a lane. As I headed up the cooling tarmac, I glanced into the field and noticed that the cows had found their way through the gate and where heading over, the herd as one, morphing and mutating, fluid. There was no intent there now though; I was out of sight, forgotten. Free to go.

Posted by poacher in place, nature, landscape at 22:15 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

The wonder is that we can see these trees and not wonder more - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Brian has a thing about trees. Can’t stop looking at them. I’ve been abroad with him when he’s been in rapture over an avenue of pine tress. ‘Look at them, Bill,’ he’d say. ‘Aren’t they beautiful! People don’t appreciate beauty these days. They look at everything but they don’t really see. Who really looks at trees and sees their shapes and colours? They’re magic! That’s what it’s all about! - Bill Clough talking about his brother, Brian.

Ah now, this is the stuff - a blog dedicated to biographies of great British trees. Little more needs to be said. Go see.

Posted by poacher in place, nature, landscape at 17:24 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Some astounding images of a dead Russian sea plane. (Spotted on a @eleventhvolume tweet).

Posted by poacher in photography at 09:39 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Belly of the Whale. Image by Robin Friend


Greenhouse. Image by Robin Friend


West Country. Image by Robin Friend

"The landscape is in danger of losing its capacity to keep secrets from us."

We've not had much in the way of photography on here recently, but I came across Robin Friend today (courtesy of youyouidiot) and wanted to share. His photographs have got a damp melancholy to them, and feel both secretive and oddly voyeuristic, as if Friend were trying to restore some of the secret nature he sees as being leached away from our relationship to landscape. You can more of his work at robinfriend.co.uk and youyou has an article on Friend in this month's Hotshoe magazine.

Posted by poacher in photography at 12:37 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Excuse the long hiatus, I've been sweating it out beneath the roaring sun in The Gambia and Senegal. I stepped outside work today, into the first pool of sun I've seen since being back and could scarce believe that just five days ago I was facing the same bright disc and barely able to stand it. The shot above was taken about 100km inland from the coast in Senegal at the a ford of a river. The area was rich with cultivation - onions, tomatoes, lettuce - and people tended neat gardens, pulling at weeds, taking water straight from the river with battered metal watering cans. We sat at the ford for a time and watched the comings and goings, which was mainly people passing between villages, some with things to sell, others on social visits or simply on their way to school. What I love best about the photo is the little feet. All three women had children in these back slings (though two are obscured), and each of the children looked as if they could sleep all day long. Amen to that.

Posted by poacher in photography at 17:53 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Fishermen row a boat in the algae-filled Chaohu Lake in Hefei, Anhui province, China. Image from REUTERS/Jianan Yu


Chinese military singers take part in a chorus performance of patriotic songs. Image from AP Photo


A Hindu woman devotee offers prayers after taking a holy dip in the waters of river Ganga in the northern Indian city of Allahabad. REUTERS/Jitendra Prakash

Dazzling, humbling 3 part suite of photos from 2009 over the Big Picture blog. There isn't much to say except go and take a look.

Posted by poacher in photography at 21:08 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Paul is a friend who is working in Abu Dhabi and he shot this footage from his hotel balcony. It is a thing of complete simplicity and is no less than dazzling.

Arriving in Abu Dhabi my initial reaction, standing on the balcony of my hotel room on the 20th floor, was disorientation and near-vertigo. Laid out before me was a building site on a scale I had never seen before; a small island was under construction.

This was “a room with a view” of a very different kind. Not some picturesque vista illustrating historical achievement but a vast, stark scene of becoming; a display of the knowledge, effort and will required to alter the landscape and create a new world.

The Alva Noto track 'Xerrox Monophaser 2' that forms the soundtrack to this, fits so perfectly it feels built for the task. Uncanny. Xerrox Vol. 2 is out on Raster Norton and well worth getting.

Posted by poacher in place, nature, landscape at 09:41 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

A couple of dazzling galleries of images from the lens of Francis Wolff - from the peerless If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger blog. Woolf was an executive at Blue Note, a company set up by his childhood friend and co-German emigre Alfred Lion, and Woolff used his access to the rehearsal sessions to full effect. Awesome. Genuinely.


Elvin Jones


Eric Dolphy


John Coltrane

Posted by poacher in photography at 21:01 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

The harbour bridge, obscure

As a city that is so concerned with itself as a spectacle, the current dustcloak that is choking Sydney must be doubly disorienting. There have been some amazing shots of the dust storms - the above is probably my favourite (taken, I assume from the Rocks end of the bridge) - but there are some other jaw-dropping efforts contained in these two Flickr galleries.

Edit: A fantastic piece on this from Dan Hill of City of Sound. (Cheers to John Coulthart for the tip on this).

Posted by poacher in photography at 13:27 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)