Elin Már Øyen Vister: Soundscape Røst – Spaces and Species Vol I
Gruenrekorder

I haven't visited the Røst archipelago, located 100 km west of northern Norway, but Elin Már Øyen Vister's collection of soundscapes from the area grants me a fairly strong impression of what it would be like to do so. As I play the vinyl album (issued in a 300-copy run) and read the accompanying notes for its twelve pieces, the site's soundworld comes vividly to life as I picture myself on one of its islands surrounded by site-specific birds flooding the air with vocalizations.

She created the album from many hours of sound material recorded between 2010 and 2011. While the presented tracks sound like undoctored field recordings gathered at different island spots, notes on the album's inner sleeve suggest that some degree of editing was applied (“As a sound recordist,” she writes, “I have created hyper-realities and made some artistic decisions along the way that have shaped the content of what you listen to”). Even so, the settings come across as natural documents captured in real time. Shifting the focus away from the human being to the landscape itself is consistent with Már's desire to examine places in their fullest sense and to study the ways all of the habitants of a site interact. For anyone wondering why field recordings compiled a decade ago are only now being made available, the material in fact originally appeared in 2012 in a self-released digital form but is now being issued by Gruenrekorder as the first vinyl chapter in a trilogy.

The album splits into “North” and “South” sides, with the locations associated with the tracks clarified by a map on the inner panel, the gesture a helpful aid for the listener wishing to conjure the experience of being there. The chatter of different gull types—the Great Blacked Back, Herring, and Common—resounds throughout the opening “Ebb and flow through seaweed,” with the rustle of water and air on mainland Røst a backdrop. The gulls make a return appearance in “Seagulls on the south side of Storfjellet,” this time augmented by the low-frequency chatter of the Razor Bill. In “Kårøysundet early spring morning,” Már, recording from a small boat, captures the quacks and hoo-hoos of Common Eiders and sounds generated by the Kittiwakes of Kårøya. The latter's ‘voice' is particularly unusual, a warble and wail that at certain moments resembles a whimper or even laughter; they appear in “The birdcliffs of Vedøy” too, though this time as a shrieking, engulfing mass.

The recording at times gets extremely close to the birds. The fluttering of wings seems like it's happening an arm's length away during “Midsummer in Hernykens eastern skree,” as does the cow-like mooing of various bird types and the chirping of hungry chicks. On the “South” side, “Ellevsnyken eastern skree” catches the ear for the guttural, almost porcine croak of the Razor Bill and the squeal of other birds off in the distance. “Puffins wheeling and swarming” documents a cyclic group activity called wheeling that sees them moving en masse in an elliptical formation when flying upwards towards their nest sites.

March 2022