single

Tomáš Šenkyřík Slavik

Label / Skupina
Category / Field Recording, Soundscape, Ambient
Code / skpn005

Yesterday we came back from a wine tasting event where our friend told us that, come May, he would take us to listen to the nightingale singing at midnight. “Could you go with us and record it?”, he asked me. Immediately, I said yes. I had wished to record the nightingale at night for a longer time. We agreed to try it during midnight on May 14th (2017). That day was supposed to be a full moon which has a good effect on the nightingale’s singing. In the evening, while I was preparing my recording gear, I constantly heard in my head the feuilleton of Jan Skácel about how Czechoslovak Radio recorded a nightingale in Židlochovice. The radio staff went to the Židlochivice park at that time. They took a bunch of magnetic tapes, cables and other kinds of equipment, carefully built and connect everything up, and waited. The Židlochovice nightingale was quiet and did not sing that night. According to the locals, the nightingales sang very loudly during the whole May. Only that day, as Jan Skácel wrote, birds were silent for incomprehensible reasons. When I set my recorder, microphones and parabola, and got into the car, I kept thinking about Skácel's writing. Will it be like it was with the Radio? When I reached the place and exited the car I felt a pleasant humidity and May's warm air. Dense steam went up from the fields nearby the Šatava river. A few steps later, I heard one or two nightingales. Their singing sounded acute into the quiet night. I recorded them for more then an hour without changing place. I forgot about the time and recording likewise. For me it seemed to be that the nightingale was giving me a message about the unique harmony of nature. At around two in the morning we were sitting on the terrace of my friend who organized the trip to hear the nightingales. He thought back to a time 40 years ago when he went with his wife to the same place in order to listen to the nightingale. He told me that somewhere he still has audiotape recordings of the nightingale from the same places, recorded in 1978. He found it and we digitalized it together with Skupina. The album you are going to hear starts with the recording from the late 1970s. There are three time zones in total. The years of 1978, 2017 and 2018. The second side of the album is dedicated to the place and time without the bird. It is a portrait of a place, how it sounds when the bird is not present, when the trees are swelled by chilly wind, when ice floes float on the Šatava river. But somewhere in the head we can still hear its singing, or at least we suspect it’s there. (Tomáš Šenkyřík)

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Tomáš Šenkyřík Slavik

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