Birds Versus Cities

Metamere

This was a group effort, with eleven other people contributing drones for the March 2025 REM Drone Orchestra, with the topic for the month being “birds”. There were quite a variety of different approaches. My drone involved taking a field recording from a river canoe trip on the northern part of the Namekagon, which featured a bluejay yelling at a crow, a crow that was imitating the bluejay and screaming its head off, and a pine warbler doing it’s own songbird thing in the distance. I isolated the samples, and stretched them out for the 100x, and arranged things so that they added a building tension and release. I didn’t think it worked well to just layer everything equally, so I went wild with cutting up and rearranging things for the mix, including a bunch of fading in and out of parts, and I think it turned out pretty epic. It tells an interesting story for me. The bird calls are a cacophony, but they disappear slowly, and before you know it, you just have the noise of the city. It takes some effort, but when you get back out into nature, the bird sounds are welcome.