santafe.sound

PARKING LEVEL THREE

2011-03-12T23:05:00.018-07:00

There's this parking garage in the Railyard in Santa Fe. The Railyard is a relatively new beautification project and the city is pretty uptight about construction ruining the oh-so-historical visual vibe downtown so the built the garage underground. And they were supposed to build a movie theater, and the street parking ticket machines weren't supposed to break, and the economy wasn't supposed to crash. But none of that worked out so most of the time it's pretty empty, especially on the bottom level.

I got this great new field recorder recently - a Zoom H1. It's not exactly "pro", but I realized that while I love my Marantz PMD, the thing I really longed for was that put-it-in-your-pocket ability. A field recorder I could just carry around to capture the unforeseen sound opportunity. The first day I took it out I stumbled into the parking garage and discovered the great sound the ventilation system makes with the big nothingness. This is what it sounds like:

[12:35/30.2mb]
[mp3Link]

The thing making the constant drone is actually a pair of fans that are moving the air throughout the garage. I believe the correct term is "ginormous". They're big and insistent and live in cages on either side of the back end of the third level. It may be that having just watched the Charlie Chaplin film "Modern Times", big machines seem rather symbolic to me, but they really give the place a spooky factory feel. However, if you slow the recording down to 1/4 speed, they actually sound kinda nice (but watch out, it's pretty bassy):

[6:00/14.4mb]
[mp3Link]

SIOUX FALLS CICADA

2010-08-15T14:30:00.004-06:00

I went home to Sioux Falls, South Dakota recently and it felt like I had crash-landed in a big bucket of heat and humidity and most interesting to me, cicadas. Cicadas are those pre-historic looking beasties that depending on the species spend between 2 and 17 years under ground, come up, shed their skins, and spend the rest of their life (4-6 weeks) sitting in trees singing "hey, come have sex with me" songs. At least the males do - females can make other sounds, but they can't sing the way males can.

Male cicadas have these things called timbals on their that they use to make noise. It doesn't work like crickets, where they rub things together to make noise. They use muscles to flex the timbals in and out and each time it moves it makes a click. Their abdomen is hollow and acts as a resonance chamber. They flex their muscles real fast and get that familiar buzz. The little Barry Whites even move their abdomens back and forth in relation to the tree they're perched in to use the echoes to modulate the sound.

Another interesting fact is that males can disable their ears while calling. Which is good for them because cicadas can produce close range sound levels up to 120dB, equivalent to say sandblasting or a shotgun. About at the pain threshold in humans and definitely capable of causing permanent hearing damage. I wasn't able to find any information about why it's so loud. Is it the result of competition, desperation, or some sort of cicada "macho"? I did read though that some of the species have a quieter courtship song that gets sung after the female is called in. Although how they'd hear it over all the other noise I don't know.

I wasn't planning to record anything on my trip so I hadn't brought any gear with me. This recording was done by sitting my laptop out in my mom's backyard and recording with the built-in mic. Which means it's mono, but you can still get a pretty good sense of the polyphonic choir that bounces back and forth between the trees and how it mixes with the cars and air conditioners of the neighborhood. At about 3:28 there's a loud snap. I don't know what it was - I had gone inside so as not to disturb the recording - but it sure seemed to get the cicadas excited.

Credit for the photo goes to J. A. Pyle from backyardnature.net.

[10:02/15.4mb]
[mp3Link]

PITCH-SHIFTED PUG

2010-04-24T19:19:00.014-06:00

This July, Parallel Flux, a group I'm involved with is putting on a big worldwide streaming media art project. About a month before that happens we're going to have a fundraising party cuz we all want to dance. Since the project is based on everyday sights and sounds, I've spent the last few hours trolling through field recordings looking for thigs to lay on top of beats while I'm DJ'ing.

As I was cruising the hard drive highway, I happened across a recording I made years ago, of playing tug of war (with a squeaky t-bone squeeze toy) with my friend Sara's pug Ruby. It sounded so emotive that I had to mess with it and see what it revealed. A little pitch-shifting took it to an unexpected place.

[3:51/5.6mb]
[mp3Link]

GUITAR.WAVES

2009-01-07T14:25:00.007-07:00

Hey - I have a new project and a new release. You can read all about it at PRETTYLITTLEPAW. I like to think of it as pieces composed from field recordings of guitars. This particular one is called NEVER QUITE MADE IT TO THE OCEAN. Everything you hear (in this song and the whole project) came out of a guitar.

[5:50/8mb]
[mp3Link]

BINAURAL HIKIN'

2008-11-22T22:18:00.004-07:00

Shortly after I moved to NM I went out for a hike and as I was strolling down the path I had the thought that people who work in cubicles might appreciate being able to listen to a hike - maybe on the train or as a lunch break thing. Suddenly it's 9 years later and I finally got around to recording a hike. It's not really as weak as it seems though - I didn't have a field recorder when I got the idea and later, when I tried recording a hike it was all cable and pack noise. But now I've got the recorder and the mics that sit on my glasses so I decided to give it another try. This is a stereo recording made with binaural mics so headphones will give you the best listening experience. It's kinda like a 3D movie - you can watch it on your TV, but if you go to the theater and put on the dorky glasses - wow. Since I knew I was going to try making a recording I just went on a short ramble up the Atalaya Hills arroyo by St. John's [GoogleMaps] .

[16:25/23.2mb]
[mp3Link]

POST FOR TONY

2008-06-11T20:53:00.002-06:00

A little while ago my friend Tony started an online conversation (with mostly expatriates) about the record shops we all used to go to when we lived in the Twin Cities - which ones do you remember, which ones are still around . . . I took a trip there recently and was happy to see how many of the shops on the list are still making it. It always makes me sad to see a steakhouse where Northern Lights used to be, but there's a Cheapo in both Minneapolis and St. Paul, which is a good thing even if the original location has turned into a Now Sports. I'm happy to say that my favorite shop from the old hood is still kicking. Wearing my not-so-obvious binaural rig with the mics on my glasses and cables run through a croakie and down my back (someone once told me I look like an 80s dork wearing an iPod) I took a little walk down Lyndale Ave., into Treehouse Records (once upon a time it was Oarfolkjokeopus) and was very happy with what I found. I ended up coming back later and picking up the Folsom Prison record I mention in the clip as well as Invisible Hitchcock, Groovy Decay, Glenn Gould plays Bach and a pristine Peter Rowan disc from 1980 still in the plastic wrap. It's a real thing of beauty, which, while I have totally embraced digital music, is something I've never said about a CD.

[3:09/4.2mb]
[mp3Link]

MYSTERY MESSAGE

2008-05-31T23:55:00.006-06:00

I'm betting that this is something everyone can identify with. Y'know when your phone rings and you pick it up and there's just this white noise intermittently broken by semi-intelligible syllables? That's the sound of someone who has accidently dialed your number, usually because they pressed speed-dial or redial by carrying their cell in a pocket. Either that or they sat on it and dialed with their butt. However it happens, it's kinda the modern equivalent of monkeys typing Shakespeare. The other day I got one of these calls (I think it was a butt-dial because it seems the call was made from a car) and it rolled over to my voicemail so naturally my first inclination was to record it into my PMD and share it with the world.

[4:22/5.1mb]
[mp3Link]

SATURDAY NIGHT CALLE ANDREW

2008-05-31T23:30:00.009-06:00

Back in 2006 when I started this blog, the very first post I did was a recording out the door at my old place on W. San Francisco St. [link] The other night I was sitting in the living room of my new place on the south side of Santa Fe and realized that the sound outside the door was kinda different and kinda the same. I still have crickets, but they're louder. I still have action in the distance, but it's there's more of it.

[1:00/1.1mb]
[mp3Link]

GUITAR.FACTORY

2008-01-20T18:57:00.000-07:00

I know this one is a little more composed than most of the other things I've put up but I just finished it, I like it a lot and I want other people to hear it. And it does fall under the broad definition I made for my blog content as being sound collected "in and around Santa Fe, NM." More specifically, it was composed of sound collected in and around my studio. I've been working for a little while on a group of pieces I'm going to call guitarLandscapes. All of the sounds in all of the pieces, as warped and modified as they may be from their original incarnation, were created on a guitar. I call this one "factory."

[10:17/11.9mb]
[mp3Link]

STEAMY

2007-12-19T22:12:00.000-07:00

This is just plainly and simply a teakettle coming to a boil in slow motion. I set up a stereo pair of condenser mics, made a recording of the kettle and then slowed it down and dropped the pitch by a factor of 4. There is also some EQ going on and I like the way it sounds running through a reverb. It's really nice how slowly tones come and go - and the car that drives by adds a cool little something too. (By the way - I noticed that while this sounds good on my big speakers, headphones and computer speakers, the loud part kinda pushed the limits of my laptop speakers.)

[12:09/13.9mb]
[mp3Link]

TIRED BUDDHA

2007-08-19T22:42:00.000-06:00

The Buddha Machine is without question one of the coolest audio gizmos ever created. If you don't know what it is, you can check it out here. There's the droney loops, the old-transistor-radio aesthetic, the pretty colors, the mysterious FM3 logo, the "Brian Eno bought 9 of them" story . . . it's got it all.

I got mine from my friends Tony and Sara after I recorded their wedding. Having thought I had heard all of the cool sounds the Machine had to make, I was thrilled the other day when I switched it on and heard a brand new sound - the sound of the almost-dead Made-In-China Gaosheng batteries trying to drive the built-in speaker.

[0:33/0.6mb]
[mp3Link]

FRIGID AIR

2007-08-19T21:21:00.000-06:00

I have a swamp cooler in my new apartment. This is a good thing, and not just because tomorrow is supposed to be 95 degrees. Unlike an air conditioner, with a swamp cooler you're supposed to leave a window open a little to allow for some air flow. This flow over the closed window blinds creates a nice rattley background ambience. For this recording I cranked up the mics and made the background very foreground. It's actually a mix of 2 recordings, one done at 4:30 pm and the other at 10 pm. I'm not usually the sort to say "listen to this on headphones" but in this case there are lots of low frequencies that will be lost on the average laptop speaker so whatever you can do to hear the low end would be good.

[4:54/5.6mb]
[mp3Link]

FASOLA

2007-04-23T23:23:00.000-06:00

On Saturday, April 21st I went with my Field Recording class to the All-Species Day at Frenchy's Field in Santa Fe. It started out kinda cold and kinda windy and just got worse from there. It was poorly attended, got started late and after the parade down the street to EcoVersity it started to rain. Whee.

But it was totally worth it to hear the Albuquerque Shape Note Choir. I'd never heard of shape note singing before (also known as Sacred Harp singing) but it's basically a hymnal choir where everyone sings sitting and facing each other and the music in the books is printed in shapes that correspond with solfege syllables. Wikipedia has a great article about it. As you can hear, before singing each piece with the words, the group sings through it once with the fasola's. It was a really nice scene, the singers sitting facing each other in the middle of a windy field and the small crowd huddled around them to listen. The name of this piece is Delight. The students involved in the recording were Tony Thibodeau, Nick Najdowski and Kate Nash.

[2:32/2.9mb]
[mp3Link]

SNAP, CRACKLE, COMPOSE

2007-04-06T21:15:00.000-06:00

This isn't actually a field recording of any sort, but it came out so cool that I just had to put it up. Last night I talked with my advanced Audio Production class about techniques of serial compostition and then we did an exercise which involved some of them writing a piece with a deck of cards. The compositional formula is shown in the picture and the sound sources came from my Homedepotphone which was really just a big pan flute made out of bottles filled with water to different levels and held in a frame. Until it fell and broke. The students who participated were Tim Gannon, Shalimar Krebs, Sibel Melik and Eric Salazar.

[1:40/1.9mb]
[mp3Link]

QUADRAPHONIC PLAZA

2007-03-20T22:16:00.000-06:00

On Saturday, March 10, 2007 I went to the Santa Fe Plaza with some of my Audio Field Recording students for a sound gathering trip. Everyone did their own thing for a while and then we tried to record the "bells" of the St. Francis Cathedral (St. Francis, like most cathedrals and churches around the world has replaced the ringing of the bells with the playing of a CD of bells ringing through speakers in the belltowers.) After scouting out great positions and getting all set up, someone forget to press "play" at noon. So what we did instead was to make a five minute four-part synced recording standing on all four corners of the plaza. I was on the North corner, Tony Thibodeau was on the East corner, Nick Najdowski was on the South corner and Abaris De Los Santos was on the West corner.

[5:00/5.7mb]
[mp3Link]

BOWLING BIRTHDAY EXTRAVAGANZA-GANZA-GANZA

2007-02-26T22:56:00.000-07:00

Saturday, February 24th I had a birthday party with a whole bunch of friends at the local bowling alley. My birthdate is actually the 25th but I couldn't wait. I tried to do some recording and it was really too noisy to get much but this little snippet is pretty great though, it's my friend Tony reacting to his wife Sara picking up a spare. The guy in the pic is James and the photo was taken by Sara Stathas. She's a great photographer, you can see her website here.

[0:23/0.5mb]
[mp3Link]

FAROLITO WALK

2007-02-22T14:24:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I know. This one is way late. But I just got it done and I like it. BTW Sara Stathas took this pic. You can see her website here.

Every Xmas Eve in Santa Fe it's a tradition for the people who live or operate art galleries up and down Canyon Road to put out Farolitos (candles in paper bags), make hot chocolate and set fires in the street and on the sidewalks. Then bunches of people show up and sing Xmas carols. If you heard about it you might get a very Dickensian-with-green-chile image in your head about a quaint polite gathering in a magical homey setting. In reality, it sounds a little more like "being in a NYC subway" as I heard someone comment this year. Listen for yourself:

[0:37/0.7mb]
[mp3Link]

Nonetheless it is a nice Santa Fe tradition that still feels like it's meant for the locals even if a bunch of tourists show up. And when you're standing around a fire with people you don't know trying to sing in tune and remember the words to those carols you haven't thought of for 20 years some genuinely sweet, funny and spontaneous moments can happen.

[3:01/3.5mb]
[mp3Link]

UH

2007-02-07T22:47:00.000-07:00

This is actually a piece that I did about 10 years ago, but lately it's started to make more sense to me in relation to my other work so I decided to put it up on the blog. I wanted to do something made up entirely of the things people say in between the things they mean to say and my then-roommate Matt Koegler had the brilliant idea to record C-SPAN and use it for the source material. After 4 hours of recording the US congress I had plenty of material to work with. (Incidentally, this is the same Matt Koegler credited with suggesting the name of the Frank Zappa album "Frank Zappa Meets the Mothers of Prevention." He's real good at suggesting.) Although it's pretty short it took about 2 months to edit.

[2:16/2.6mb]
[mp3Link]

SNOWDAY @ 100 BPM

2006-12-30T20:32:00.000-07:00

Every couple of years Santa Feans get a little reminder that we live in a mountain town. Over the last few days we've got a big-ol' snow-dumping-on with a total accumulation of 25". That's according to both the news and the snow outside my building, although I will admit to finding the deepest pile to make for a dramatic pic. This piece is another sound collage - all of the sounds come from a recording of a walk from my place over to the park. There's lots of trudging (and one pushy crow) and some modification was done in Ableton Live.

[4:40/5.4mb]
[mp3Link]

DUKE CITY DERBY

2006-12-25T21:36:00.000-07:00

Last Friday, 12.22.06 I had the good fortune to be able to bring my recording gear to a Duke City Derby / Santa Fe Roller Derby exhibition match. You can check out the DCD website here. Special thanks to Sarah Blaine for helping set this up - nothing sounds like a gym full of badass women on wheels. And if the accompanying pic looks a little better than my usual point-and-shoot it's because Sara Stathas was there and was nice enough to let me use her work on my blog. You can see her website here. Was it fun? I got to use my homemade parabolic reflector and a woman named "Muffin" borrowed my army knife to shorten her skirt. Hell yeah it was fun. If you live in the area, keep your eyes open and don't let an opportunity to check out a match pass you by.

[2:52/3.3mb]
[mp3Link]

PE IN NM

2006-12-09T01:41:00.001-07:00

I've been very bad about posting lately. I've been busy, I moved, I've been doing lots of other sound work, blah, blah, blah, excuse, blah, blah, excuse, blah. I feel bad about it and I want to say something like "there are times in your life when it's just hard to be creative" but I know that's crap. Accepting that opens the door to "sometimes it's hard to be social" and "sometimes it's hard to be open" and "sometimes it's hard to be loving" and I'm just not going to go there. Instead, tonight I went to see Public Enemy. (Yes, in Santa Fe. I know that sounds like an oxymoron, but they really were here. If someone reading this blog happens to be in my home town of Sioux Falls, SD then get your ass ready cause they're coming your way. You owe it to SD to go see them.) Anyhow, I got to thinking, "what would it sound like if I called my Vonage phone and recorded the show from my cell (while bouncing up and down)?" And this is what it sounds like.

PS - being jammed up against the stage, bouncing up and down with the crowd singing "Fight the Power" with PE was definitely a historic moment for me.

[0:30/296kb]
[mp3Link]

INVISIBLE MAGNETIC MISSIVE

2006-09-28T03:00:00.000-06:00

I've learned a number of things recently. One is the term IOI, or interonset interval. It's a musical term that refers to the interval between the beginnings of successive events, but it only refers to the beginnings of the events and has nothing to do with duration. Also, I've learned some of the uses of Xi, the 14th letter of the Greek alphabet. It's used in chemistry to represent the extent of reaction and in math to represent both random variables and eigenvectors. I say put IOI and Xi together and you're gonna come up with some great sounds. This piece is a remix I did for the bush-of-ghosts website put up by Brian Eno and David Byrne to mark the 25th anniversary of their amazing collaboration. bush-of-ghosts.com/remix/bush_of_ghosts.htm is the site if you want more info or your chance to do a remix. The basis of my remix is that I took the 20 source files, pulled them into Reason, assigned 20 samplers to play one file each and then created a controller modification environment that would allow me to pan, mute, change sample playback speed and send each individual sound to any or all of 4 effects (2 reverbs, delay and distortion) by typing the text from the book (My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Amos Tutuola - the inspiration for the album) as the song played. another thing I learned recently is that experimental musical excursions like this one hold absolutely no interest for me if there's no emotional content to grab onto. I see the value in experiments and exercises of all kinds but dispassionate art just turns me off. This one was easy for me as both the album and the book were huge to me in my life for the amazing works that they are, the people who I shared them with and the life experiences I was having when I discovered them. This music may sound random to some, but I'm drawn into the text-generated randomness as I find myself listening for voices.

[2:30/2.9mb]
[mp3Link]

SAFE SOUND

2006-09-24T02:16:00.000-06:00

About a month ago I was poking around online and saw a post someone put up somewhere that said something like "I wanna try underwater recording but I can't spend big $$$ on a mic just to see how it works and I know there's make-your-own schematics available but even if that was something I had the time to do I just looked for my soldering iron and can't find it." I felt his pain. I, too, wanted to explore the audio beneath the surface tension but had the same restraints and mysteriously disappeared soldering iron. So when he said "I put a condom on a mic and it worked pretty damn well." it just seemed that since it worked for him, it would work for me. And it did. In fact, the hardest thing about this was finding non-lubricated condoms (lubrication and spermicide can't be good for a mic). If after reading/listening to this, you decide you want to give it a try, I would make 3 suggestions: 1- don't try it with a mic that's not disposable. 2- don't forget to tape up the top. 3- despite the fact that the condom does seem to do a really good job of keeping the water away from the mic (and one would hope that it would), it still seems to me that using a phantom-powered mic would be a really bad idea. Electricity and water in general aren't the best mix. All sounds in this recording were captured with a Shure SM58 covered by a Trojan. I did the recording in my kitchen sink and everything you hear was either made by water or recorded underwater. Yes, the kinda-sorta-cello sound is made by water. One of the coolest revelations was that if you cover a mic with a condom, spray it with water and then time-stretch the recorded audio, the frequencies generated by the spray are playing their own melodies.

[3:29/4.0mb]
[mp3Link]

TIMESHIFT

2006-08-31T01:22:00.000-06:00

Gotta do one more electronic post. I just learned from my favorite music/computer forum BigBlueLounge.com that Digidesign has released a free new timeshifting RTAS plugin (it can be downloaded here) and boy is it just buckets of unpredictable fun. Of course it's at it's most interesting when you try and make it do things it's not supposed to do, but most everything in the music/computer world fits that description. What you are hearing is one mono loop played backwards, timestretched and run through a delay. i'm not kidding when I say I didn't spend more than 10 minutes on it. I wan't planning on posting tonight - I was supposed to be going to bed early.

[2:12/2.5mb]
[mp3Link]

ROCKY 4 + ROCKY 3 = ?

2006-08-19T01:00:00.002-06:00

So I had planned to stay home on friday night to rework my way-too-soon upcoming audio production class but when I was in the grocery store hunting and gathering it occurred to me that if I sat around instead and drank white russians and played with the circuit board of my Mr. T keychain it would kinda be like a tribute to the bad guys of Rocky 4 and Rocky 3. why would I even think of doing such a thing you ask? Well because last Sunday I went with Rebecca Chornenky (see previous post: METAL MUSIC) to High Mayhem Studios in Santa Fe to attend a workshop and performance by a Minneapolis duo called Beatrix Jar on the subject of circuit bending. In brief, circuit bending is taking apart an audio-producing piece of electronics (casio keyboard, speak and spell, Mr. T keychain . . . ) and discovering shortcuts on the circuit board that produce sounds you weren't supposed to know the device was capable of making. They were really open, interested people and so passionate about their music and their process. It was an incredible experience and Rebecca totally called it when she looked around the room and said it looked like christmas morning. So that's why it occurred to me to drink booze and make this piece. All sounds were produced by the keychain. Some composition was directed by the use of a deck of cards. And I gotta say, I didn't plan it this way (audio clip selection and length at the end was totally determined by the cards) but the end strikes me as really sad. Something about the emotive quality of the human voice, even when it's slowed-down 8-bit coming out of a novelty keychain. PS this pic is really representative of the experience - you should check it out big.

[2:43/3.1mb]
[mp3Link]

EARLY BIRDS

2006-07-21T21:07:00.000-06:00

Every morning between 4:30 and 6:ish the birds have a party outside my window. They sing a song that goes something like 'woo-hoo, the sun came up again.' Last night I set out some gear so I wouldn't have to think too much too early and got this recording. It was done from 5:45 to 5:50 am.

[5:00/5.7mb]
[mp3Link]

METAL MUSIC

2006-07-03T22:02:00.000-06:00

On my field recording class' trip to Lamy (see the previous post) some of us snuck off for a little side excursion to beat up large pieces of metal. The other side of the tracks always has the best sounding stuff - in Lamy it's mostly rusting hunks of railroad detritus. This is not a field recording per se, but a little piece I edited together using some intuition and some serial music methods. It's not perfect, but I was really excited to do something with the sounds and I think doing something perfect would have just taken way too long. I recorded some of it, Rebecca Chornenky recorded most of it and Denton McCabe, Rebecca and I made the sounds. All of the sounds you hear (metal and mic noise) were recorded on this trip. HEADPHONE WARNING: This piece has some loud passages in it.

[2:21/2.7mb]
[mp3Link]

JUST ANOTHER SONG ABOUT A TRAIN

2006-07-01T19:52:00.000-06:00

Today I took my field recording class (which I team teach with Judy Goldberg - check her out here) on the train from Santa Fe to Lamy, NM. With the help of Wali Abdush-Shakur I was able to get this really great recording of the train just being a train. I know you think you've heard recordings of trains before, but just listen to this like it's a piece of music and I promise it'll pull you in. Trains rule because they're all about dynamics.

[10:00/11.5mb]
[mp3Link]

RAIN ON W. SAN FRANCISCO ST.

2006-06-25T21:24:00.000-06:00

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know recordings of thunder and rain are a dime a dozen. but rain in Santa Fe is a little bit of a rare experience this year. And anyhow I was planning on playing tennis, so what was I supposed to do? The globe in the pic is an honest-to-god raindrop in motion captured with my cheap little point-and-shoot digital.

[5:00/5.7mb]
[mp3Link]

SANTA FE RAILYARD

2006-06-11T21:24:00.000-06:00

Historically speaking, many people associate Santa Fe with the railroad and even today there is still a company called the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad. The thing is, they don't ever actually come to Santa Fe. nonetheless, there is this historical association and a whole bunch of old track so every day a small train leaves from downtown Santa Fe hauling tourists to and from the tiny little burg of Lamy (the closest actual train station), about 25 miles away. I've always loved the sound of trains - especially kinda far away and kinda late at night. The train in this recording is neither, but I like it anyway. This pic is a detail of the side of a heavily-tagged passenger car that has been sitting in the railyard for many years.

[1:54/2.2mb]
[mp3Link]

WALK THROUGH THE PLAZA

2006-05-29T23:18:00.000-06:00

When people who don't know anything about Santa Fe come here one of the things they always end up doing is going to plaza, usually because someone tells them to. Historically speaking, it did serve a purpose and so it's more interesting and relevant than your average tourist trap, but in the end it's pretty much a crush of people who don't know what they're doing and don't know where they're going. I live on one of the streets that runs into the plaza (though at enough of a distance to be able to deal with it) and this recording is essentially me walking to the library. The part you will hear is going up W. San Francisco from Guadalupe, through the plaza and down Washington to the library.

[7:35/8.6mb]
[mp3Link]

WHIPTAIL LIZARD

2006-05-19T23:09:00.000-06:00

This recording is kinda noisy, but I love these little guys and I never thought I would ever actually get close enough to record one. This was done in Frijoles Canyon at Bandelier National Monument.

[0:30/590kb]
[mp3Link]

FRIDAY NIGHT W. SAN FRANCISCO ST.

2006-05-19T22:58:00.000-06:00

To me, my neighborhood has always had the sound of something going on somewhere else. The crickets are here, but the action is somewhere in the distance.

[1:00/1.1mb]
[mp3Link]