Back when I worked in college radio (KCSC, The Live Wire in Chico, California, ‘83-’86) I did the news with a guy named Bob O’Clock, hosted a syndicated Sunday evening Rock Over London show, and DJ’d an afternoon and an all-night free form radio show. I worked at the station with people like Mike. Larry. Chaz. Robin. Don. Bett-E Rebel. Trish. Lindsay. Toni. Tim. Procrustes. Henry Africa. Kate. Bobbie. Cole. Lisa. Matt. and Matt. And a lot of other names and faces who were around the station at that time.

For the news I could check out a field recorder to interview folks in town and that’s when I started my obsession with secretly recording the Christians on Campus meetings; random converations at the student union, at parties and in public; and rhythmic sounds of trains, feet walking down hallways and pneumatic drills in auto shops. The station had a cart room with reel-to-reel splicers and actual tape (pre-digital), and the broadcast booth had two turntables, a mixing board, microphones and boatload of records.

I had the all-night show where anything goes (2-6 AM on Tuesdays? Maybe Thursdays?). That’s when I started making field recordings, putting them down on a cart, hand-splicing the sounds and then mixing them in with my live on-air shows. With a mason jar full of coffee and milk and field recordings. And Husker Du, Tuxedo Moon, 28th Day and XTC. Iggy. Television. Wire. Crass. Minor Threat. Vomit Launch, Soma Holiday, Scratch Acid, Volcano Suns. Green on Red. Negative Land. Agent Orange. Game Theory. Barnachle Choir. Mama’s and the Papas. Bob Dylan’s Tangled Up In Blue, Tuxedo Moon’s Seeding the Clouds Today, Snakefinger and the Beatle’s song “It’s all Too Much” playing over and over and over.

It was the eighties, Chico was in the emerald triangle, Reagan had his war on drugs and CAMP raids, Thomas Pynchon was rumored to be nearby writing Vineland, the Christians on Campus were protesting the station because someone played a song that referred to women’s menstruation in the lycrics, The Chico Feminist Women’s Health Collective was giving out birth control and coordinating clinic defense teams before restraining orders were a thing, and punk rock was everywhere. I lived with Trish and Kelly in a house called The Rat Box for god sakes. It was a dangerous, glorious and wildly creative time.

That’s when I fell in love with field recordings and mixing found sounds. Getting saved/born-again live on the air over Throbbing Gristle or Nurse with Wound. Or Cocteau Twins. Mixing the levels up and down and in and out. Overlaying that with the Christians on Campus meetings I had been secretly recording. Footsteps echoing down a hallway, the train rolling through town. I loved making an aural landscape to build stories and feelings in my all-night radio shows. I loved walking out of the station after my show was over, into the 6 AM dawn and going home to the Rat Box to pick up my backpack, drink some coffee and walk to campus for Donna Breed’s acting class, or just deciding to call it and crash for the rest of the day.

Forty years later and I am still making field recordings, but they are more interior and nature-based — the sound of prayer flags in the wind at the Crestone, Colorado “big” stupa site; the rivers and streams of New Mexico, Colorado and the Alps; the sounds of the people-mover at Heathrow Airport; conviviality in a pre-pandemic London pub; a herd of Icelandic horses, singing folks songs together with my mother on her death bed so I could remember the words after she passes. I feel I have to get the sounds of nature and rivers and the people because things are so ephemeral. And a sound recording of a trip has a different effect than a selfie or a postcard. It’s more immediate and visceral. Capturing the wild places where the sacred still lives. Archiving the people and the cities and the music they make. I’m not a pro; I don’t have a dope rig for this — just my phone when the moment is right.

I will start loading up samplings of field recordings I’ve managed to save, salvage and post for posterity. I’ll let you know when I’m done.