There are chortling hippopotami, swarming knot conferring before winging off on migration, chattering spider monkeys and the rhythmic scrapes of male corncrakes advertising their availability - complex arrangements are produced by their desire to outshout each other. Watson take natural surveillance to obsessive extremes, using microphone triangulation to localise a nightjar in the darkness and record it. Kittiwakes scold and chastise each other from their nests on a cliff face. The wings of a wood-pigeon chop the air into fat waves. Sleeping elephants, their heavy breathing reassuring in the squeaking moonlight.
Deathwatch beetles run up and down the rafters in an English cottage bedroom.
An owl calls outside, this lonely sound hovers in an otherwise almost silent night. Similarly the isolated sound of a hyena calling out co-ordinates to it's hunting companions invokes similar feeling of loneliness, and perhaps, genetic memories within us all. Again this is a pursuit which requires an inordinate amount of patience and concentration, and which teaches us new ways of listening, and so of perceiving our surroundings. Exquisite interpretations of sound material now made available on this release. Mr Lamb took original recordings of The Faraway Wind Organ and composed the title track.