hello,

this is my second field note for Forager. in the first issue, i wrote about how the album started conceptually, what i was thinking about at the time. today i want to share a bit about the first single from the album “And the Catbird Sings”.

when i first started assembling the building blocks that would become Forager, this track was close to being cut. i struggled through some of the more tedious parts of mixing, fiddling with EQ, searching for unwanted resonance. the main melodies were processed with some live sampling that felt too harsh at times, introducing digital artifacts and glitch-like textures. it always felt barely hanging on, sort of fragile.

it wasn’t until i was reviewing some of my field recordings that something clicked. i was listening to some recordings i took at Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary in Southwest Florida. the sounds felt almost otherwordly, the hum of crickets and the intermingling of bird calls. this clip features different frequencies of insect noise with a red bellied woodpecker part way through.

corckscrew-cricket-red-bellied-woodpecker by st. silva | alonetone

A track by st. silva

a few clips had a catbird chirping throughout. you’ve probably heard one of these, but didn’t know it perhaps.

gray catbirds make some truly wild sounds. they are like mockingbirds, in that they learn sounds and repeat them. but unlike mockingbirds, who tend to repeat phrases of sound 2 or 3 times in a row, catbirds rarely ever repeat a phrase in succession. they release phrase after phrase of notes for a single song, sometimes over the course of minutes. “notes” probably isn’t even the right word here. some of the sounds are more like trills, squawks, rings, clicks. to compare different calls, checkout the clips on the All About Birds site. here is a clip i took at Corkscrew with the classic catbird “mew”, which sounds to me like a cat meowing (hence the name?)

catbird-corkscrew by st. silva | alonetone

A track by st. silva

i went back to the main synth part for the song. i listened with different ears. the “imperfections” that grated at me before sounded different. they were the things that made the song interesting, unusual, organic. maybe this is just one of those “hindsight is 20/20” kind of things, some kind of retroactive justification. but when it came time to title the track, i knew that the catbird’s call was the sonic home.

the noise and hiss in my original takes also took on a new character. they sounded to my ears like insect hum, like crickets laying a high frequency bed of white noise in the background. so instead of trying to remove this from the take, i leaned into it. here is the original clip that started the song, noise accentuated. i love how the melody jumps around erratically, much like some of the catbird songs.

catbird-texture-hi by st. silva | alonetone

A track by st. silva

to create a denser texture, and to try to imitate the diversity of sounds captured in those field recordings, i doubled this take and pitched down the second copy by an octave. the result is a slower, more meandering texture with noise that is lower in pitch and softer in character.

catbird-texture-low by st. silva | alonetone

A track by st. silva

the finished version of “And the Catbird Sings” is a combination of the above textures, field recordings, and a few additional treatments and modular synth stems. but if i were to strip away all of the excess, the soul of the song is really what i wrote about above. and in a way, this is a snippet of how each track of Forager came together: an isolated take of music or sound given a home by recontextualizing it through the sounds of nature.

only one month until the full album Forager comes out. i just got a sneak peek at the cassettes in production and i’m thrilled with how they turned out. you can preorder one here.

i hope to publish at least a few more of these “field notes” before then. in the next issue, i’ll share some demos that didn’t make the cut for the full album.

till next time,

ben // st. silva