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this week we begin another look back at some classic editions of framework:afield, never before online and not heard since their initial broadcasts almost 20 years ago. we begin with an edition produced in portland, oregon by seth nehil, originally aired on july 12th, 2006, edition #121. for more of seth’s work see https://sethnehil.net. you can find his notes with the playlist below.
Seth Nehil – Notes for Afield
1:23 The first track is from an album with John Grzinich called gyre. This work was created during my post-grad school visit with John in Mooste, Estonia in late 2005, a very welcome transitional time – several months to record, talk, collaborate and enjoy natural areas. The opening sound consists of bowed wires tensioned to large metal canisters, with objects (leaves? paper?) resting on the wires, rattling – the song of metal. Later, glass jugs slowly dragged in a circle inside an abandoned barn.
This is a piece of long crossfades, extended textures, a wordless dialogue. Taking pleasure in the small crackles and stochastic micro-events caused by patient interactions with physical objects. An attention to the resonance of materials and spaces, and a care to leave evidence of that in the sound. Layering and counterpoint of spaces and actions are the primary compositional tool, with long recordings left largely intact. I think this was the first project in which I felt comfortable working in a DAW – late night sessions at a residency in Turku, Finland with John. gyre was collaborative from the beginning – recordings made together and assembled together.
10:53 A track from ecllipses with Matthew Marble. Many of these sounds are interactions with drums and membranes, rattles and grass. My contributions were created with minidisc recorder and ADAT (digital 8-track) – my methodology at the time was largely based in layering and density, multitracking a single sound source at various pitches and then bouncing that down as a stratum for further mixing. The ADAT could pitch shift up/down by 300 cents, so there were a lot of minor thirds (though many of the sound sources had indefinite pitch).
The connection to field recording may be tenuous, but there was a focus on acoustic sound and organic objects. I was never interested in “field recording” as a sole source of compositional material and anyway, since I didn’t have a studio, the boundary between field recording and non-field recording seemed rather blurry. I often recorded in acoustically porous spaces or outdoors, and recordings made “in the field” were often interventions – playing of found materials or objects within the environment – and were almost always manipulated afterwards through simple collage processes.
17:23 This track is also from ecllipses. The title is a portmanteau of “eclipse” and “ellipses” – both a kind of erasing, obscuring or removal – a pause, a gap. I was fascinated by sounds that rested somewhere between pattern and scatter, and thought of those somewhat like the “…” of an ellipses. Pointillistic sounds that, when layered densely, began to fill in a tonality. My process was usually additive, like spraying a canvas with many small dots of color that together fuse into a hue. As for the other word, an eclipse is a moment beautiful in its rarity, a shift in perspective …and I often associate my music with darkness and night.
Listening back now I very much appreciate Matt’s contributions, which were more gestural and vivid than my continuous textural layers. He was starting to work digitally, and was fascinated by a very fine level of volume automation – a timescale in between rhythm and noise. Tiny, laborious envelopes were drawn in, resulting in rapid bursts or clicks, with the original sound source disrupted and revealed. There are also some moments of layered chanted words buried in the mix, foreshadowing some of my experiments with voice on albums such as Flock & Tumble. This album was mostly created with Matt and I in separate places – though we did spend several days working on a computer in the basement sound studio at Bard College. Many of my sounds were recorded in Portland OR, just prior to moving to New York. Sketches and sections of ecllipses were played for faculty during one-on-one meetings but I felt very unclear about compositional form, and my confusion was exacerbated by the many conflicting bits of advice and feedback I received. I asked Matt to help me assemble and finish the album, integrating it with his material and finding places of overlap in our sonic interests.
25:28 A track from the album sillage, with Brendan Murray. In 2004, Howie Stelzer invited us to present an improvisational collaboration for the Intransitive Music Festival. I remember we made one rule, which was “no fades”. I was challenging myself to get away from the long/slow timescale that so much of my previous work was based on – I was starting to feel that an extended crossfade was an assumed strategy in so much ambient and experimental music as to be almost a non-decision. But of course, that was just a very localized view. I was interested in the mute button as a way to interrupt sounds, punching holes in their continuity and creating haphazard rhythms out of continuous tones.
In the concert, I think I worked with multiple CD players and the mixer. I don’t remember what Brendan used but it may have included an MPC and effects pedals. We recorded the set and used it as primary source material for continued exchanges, mailing burned CDs between Boston and NYC. We had no fealty to the live concert and proceeded to chop it up, rearranging, layering and adding into it while maintaining the “no fades” rule.
29:01 Another track from the sillage album with Brendan. In the broadcast, I say the piece is “by sillage” – I think we were considering it to be the name of our duo as well as the name of the album. The word (which I mispronounce) was taken from an article in The New Yorker about perfume and fragrance design. (I remember reading it at a stand-up counter in the donut shop near Penn Station, where I would exit the subway each day after working at a Montessori preschool. Blearily, I would have a donut and a cup of bad coffee, while reading or jotting down ideas for future compositions.) The term translates as “wake” and describes the scent left behind in a room, after someone has left. I loved this as a metaphor for sound – an ephemeral occurrence, a temporary disturbance of the air that leaves behind an alteration in the listener, in the form of physiological reaction and memory.
This track is somewhat mysterious to me – I can’t remember many of sources… but the distant music is from a concert in the lobby of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with the roar and hubbub of the crowded space. Buried underneath are short low bursts from blowing into the long wood-encased pipes of a disassembled church organ. There’s a crackling sound that was made by playing a tape of rubbed wineglasses on a broken cassette player. There’s the sound of crunching dry leaves onto the wound strings of a double bass, laying on its back in a field in Pendleton, OR. Some of these materials date back many years prior, having been excavated from archives of recordings.
39:08 A track from my album Amnemonic Site. The opening field recording is from a Chinese New Year celebration in Chinatown, Manhattan. I loved the timbre of the voices, feedback and distortion coming from PA systems in the parade, mixing with the chaos of the crowd, the whish and bang of fireworks, the chaotic clusters of activity. I combined this with recordings of another piece I contributed to the 2004 Intransitive Music Festival. I was becoming interested in group activities, simple scores and sound-making actions, inspired by recordings of Cornelius Cardew & Scratch Orchestra’s The Great Learning, which were being reissued around that time. I used multiples of various “instruments” such as cheap harmonicas, chunks of wood and “popper” firecrackers. On a structural level, I was inspired by the unpredictable bursts and scattered impulses of the New Year’s recording, curious if I could translate that to loosely-guided group actions. On the album, I integrated both the real-world moment and its abstracted version – I was interested in obscuring the boundary between field recording and composition, interleaving the two modes.
The working title for the album was Amusia, changed later. This term refers to a neurological loss of ability to understand music, as described by Oliver Sacks. I think my use of the word may have been an attempt to describe how I was feeling after three summers of the Sound/Music program at Bard… an experience of deconstruction and questioning. Though at the time, I meant it as a positive – to approach music without preconceived notions of what it could sound like, and to hear the world with fresh ears as a musical composition. I worked on this album in the brand-new recording studio at Bard, staying an extra month after finishing my third and final summer – having been given permission to freely access the space. It was a lovely but solitary month, with all the other grad students having moved on, and the undergraduate students having not yet returned to Red Hook and campus. I spent long, focused hours recording quiet details and assembling the noisy collection of materials.
51:18 A return to the gyre album with John Grzinich. This track opens with a long section recorded in the Estonian forest outside of Mooste. Several takes were layered but otherwise unaltered – the reverb is entirely natural, a unique transparent, open sound created by the reflection from many small-diameter but densely packed trees. We scattered out through the woods, away from the microphone, moving farther and farther away, tapping at the trees in some kind of wooden morse code.
20 years later, it’s good to hear all of this exchange with artists and composers I admire.
– S.N. February 19, 2026
Finished pieces eventually released on the following albums:
- gyre (Cut, 2006)
- ecllipses (And/Oar, 2008)
- sillage (Sedimental, 2007)
- Amnemonic Site (Alluvial Recordings, 2007)