Field recordings hold a special place in my heart - part active listening, part hunting, part happy accident, part polaroid, part archive - though wholly personal. No two recordings made in the same place at the same time will be identical and therein lies the beauty of the work. Similar to photography or portraiture, the artist selects the frame and what to prioritize, within that frame (either in pre or post production). These choices ultimately help shape the ways in which the listener can come to and understand the sounds.

Thanks to reader and frequent commenter 'deckeda' for turning us on to The Avant Garde Project:

The Avant Garde Project is a series of recordings of 20th-century classical, experimental, and electroacoustic music digitized from LPs whose music has in most cases never been released on CD, and so is effectively inaccessible to the vast majority of music listeners today.

Now you can download the Transverse Temporal Gyrus app that will play three hours of Animal Collective’s music “in a new and unique way each time you run it.”

I received this rather minimal email with a subject line reading Archive.org,

Anything from the Mermen (usually very high quality equipment used in the recording, especially those done by Steve Brown)

My Surf Coasters recordings...the performances are stunning."

One thing that comes up repeatedly in discussions with other music lovers and audiophiles regarding CD vs. high resolution digital formats, is the fact that most folks have no means of making a valid comparison. Often, the high resolution version of a record is mastered at a different session, sometimes by a different engineer. At many so-called "format shootouts", one hears level differences, EQ differences, etc., making a true comparison of the formats impossible. Astute listeners realize these are comparisons of different masterings and not of the formats themselves.

[reader and frequent commenter deckeda shares an intimate recording]

My "Pick 1" is a 1976 Warren Zevon performance in a live radio studio broadcast. So it's basically a bootleg, but a sanctioned one available at archive.org (His son Jordan gave the approval.)