If you jump a fence to record the neighbor’s yapping dog and have to run back in order to not get bitten and mauled by a raving Danish bulldog, then you’re a field recordist.

I did all that, creeping under cars, climbing on trees, taking a walk in the dead of night to record birds without the noise of planes and racing cars, attracting weird looks of passers-by while recording an apparantly silent trash can. Sometimes you have to get dirty to get the clean sound.

I love recording sounds. And I especially love it to come back home and tweak and squeeze them to feed a sampler. I started recording when everything was measured in inches of tape per second, today, with calculating mega and giga bytes of sound data, it hasn’t lost its magic. Sounds are everywhere and everything can be turned into sound. I even loaded binary JPEG files into sound editors just to kill my speakers. But the sound was new.