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Sonic Recall #1: Soundcloud, c. 1985
I’m closing out 2023 with the first installment of a project I hope to continue on a regular basis throughout 2024.
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Communiqué 16: Try, catch
It’s been a while since I last posted one of these installments to the blog. If you’ve been checking in here for the past year, you will have noticed that my activity here has been restricted to a handful of essays. I had intended to keep these Communiques going too, since I feel like they…
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It’ll take a long time
Reflections on two trips to Kangaroo Island (2019, 2020) A note: this will be the last essay I publish to my blog. In future, these will be posted to my Substack page which you can find here. Over the years I’ve frequently listened against the quiet of natural landscapes, straining to hear something materialise out…
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Place to be
The plains that I crossed in those days were not endlessly alike. Sometimes I looked over a great shallow valley with scattered trees and idle cattle and perhaps a meagre stream at its centre. Sometimes, at the end of a tract of utterly uncompromising country, the road rose towards what was unquestionably a hill before…
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The chorale sea
I was standing on Lady Bay beach on the Fleurieu Peninsula in October 2022 with an AudioMoth in hand. Cool conditions had extended from an atypically freezing 2022 winter (by South Australian standards) into the Spring months with perpetually overcast skies, miserable wind and buckets of rain thanks to a third consecutive La Ninã climate…
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There goes the ice
We’d been hiking for a little while before our guide brought us to a stop and pointed out something beneath a transparent layer of the glacier. It was a little constellation of dust particles forming a subtle complexion against the ice. It wasn’t just any dust. Over a year ago, this dust had travelled about…
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I’d rather be lonely
As a child I had a fascination with remote places. In the house I grew up in, I regularly poured over Time Life cyclopedias as well as a huge detailed map of the world. I’d spend hours familiarising myself with the names of countries, their capital cities, shared borders and the colour schemes and insignia…
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Communiqué 14: casting in
It’s September and this is the first post on my blog for 2021. How on Earth did this happen? After all, this blog – in spite of the odd patch of inactivity – has been a regular repository for various musings since 2009 (or 2006 if you count the old Blogspot one.) I’m certain I…