hi,

this is the first issue of a series i’m calling “field notes” on the creation of my upcoming album “Forager”. i can often feel overwhelmed on instagram, and it feels like not the best place to share the sort of things i want to share.

posting stories and reels is not really work that fulfills me. writing text and sharing images that can be engaged with actively and with intention, not on an algorithm-driven and ad-infested tech platform, is something that feels much better to do. even if far fewer eyeballs will see it.

so here we are. in each “field note” i hope to share some audio and some writing that inspired the creating of “Forager” over the course of about a year (2024-25). i’ll also include some of my film photography from this time period, a medium i’ve really come to love over the past few years.

this album was made with a fairly simple concept: collect a bunch of sounds (in nature and in my home studio) and let them sit for a while. then, after a few months, choose a file and look for a kindred spirit of sorts. a sound or a memory or a feeling. often this meant pairing a field recording with some synthesized sound, whether it be a melody or a texture.

below is one of the earliest field recordings i captured while on a hike at the Intervale, an amazing community farm and learning center in Burlington, VT.

(i can’t embed audio in emails, so i’ll be using AloneTone, a community-driven, non-commercial music platform for audio file hosting).

intervale-walking by st. silva | alonetone

A track by st. silva

this was taken in late 2023, before i had even thought of “Forager”. I had bought a Zoom H4 field recorded a few months back and started taking it on hikes. i was still a bit clumsy with it, discovering how to get the best sound quality. there’s a really rich ecosystem at the Intervale. birdsong weaves in and out over a subtle drone of frogs and crickets.

i didn’t really have a plan for these recordings other than listening and capturing the feeling of being in a place. sound does that for me better than pictures.

a few months later, i was beginning to create my own home studio, experimenting with different signal flows and synthesizers. i tried to capture recordings here and there, not as demos, more as a kind of breadcrumb for where i was creatively. it was around this time i started thinking a lot about the idea of a “sound journal” and was inspired by musicians who kept a regular sound journal practice (in october of 2024 i even wrote a short blog post on this topic to organize some of my thoughts).

so i started keeping a sound journal. i used AloneTone, and did my best to consistently upload a few pieces of audio, which you can still explore on my profile (i trailed off after a few months, but have plans to revisit soon).

below is a link to one piece that i recorded straight off my mixer. i don’t remember how it was made exactly, but have some vague ideas. this is one of those snippets that felt like an exercise in something, not a song or a sample, but more reaching for a certain texture.

fn1-outtake by st. silva | alonetone

A track by st. silva

after a few months of this, i wanted to regularly review this growing archive. so i set aside some time each month, and eventually released “Formations 1”, a collection of audio outtakes and snippets inspired by Jim O’rourke’s steamroom sessions. this was something akin to a mixtape, a sample of sounds, but not yet a finished piece of work.

more months passed, more sounds were made. i have this memory of watching an interview with Ryuchi Sakomoto talking about how synthesizer music is often categorized as mechanical, non-natural, human made, when at its core a synthesizer is harnessing electricity and waveforms, just like lightning in the night sky. there’s this false dichotomy we often draw: nature vs manmade, organic vs synthetic. i became very interested in the space in between these dichotomies.

so the seed of “Forager” was planted. when i reviewed my musical outtakes, i started to also play field recordings i had taken in the background, listening for an interplay or a connection between “natural” and “synthesized”. the sounds i collected started to fuse.

the first single off the album, “And the Catbird Sings”, is a good example of this approach, but also one of the more “floaty” pieces on the album. other songs are more melodic, more rhythmic. i’m excited to share them on july 17.

for now, i plan to share more outtakes and field recordings from the album in these field notes. do you have a journaling/archiving practice? what does it look like? replies to this email go straight to my inbox, would love to hear.

more soon,

ben // st. silva