Some of the most social, territorial and aggressive birds known to man. Not to mention some of the the loudest. This recording moves the listener between three distinct microphone positions: one on a hill overlooking the nesting ground, the second at the edge of the nesting ground, and the third just next to one of the nests with a young tern inside.

Tide, wind and temperature in a certain balance, creating small and complex interactions of air, ice and water...some strange creature sleeping just below the surface, bubbling lava fields, mineral waters flowing deep inside the earth... This rare event proved to be the single most frustrating recording experience of my stay in Karosta, as it exposed all the limitations of my consumer-grade minidisc/microphone combo.

Latvian winters can be archetypal in their elemental power, and in the weeks in Karosta we were exposed to wind, snow, rain and ice. All of these elements carry their own distinctive acoustic signatures, and I struggled to keep up with the amazing array of sounds each new day presented. Here, a hole in the ice of the Baltic becomes a window to aquatic worlds.

Small, insect eating bats carry on a lively conversation in a small cave near some of the oldest known pictoglyphs in the Americas.

Going to Daugavpils was like stepping back in time twenty years. It seems very little has changed since the Soviet occupation here. This rainstorm was recorded in one building of a massive fortress dating to Napoleonic times but most recently used by the Soviet army. Headphones recommended.

An excerpted acoustic study of an abandoned Soviet aircraft bunker. Max Borisov wears ear-mount binaural microphones, and I test the space with bricks and stones. Max and I found this technique very interesting, as it allows one person to literally "become" a human microphone, and the other to perform for that audience/recorder [many thanks to Aaron Ximm for inspiration in this and other matters]. A clever soul might use these acoustic signatures to place other sounds in the same space virtually...

When I discovered that a crew of three, working 24 hours a day to chop wood, were required to heat the house we stayed in, I felt more than a little bit aristocratic. In Latvia, however, it is often that the shortage is not of work, but of desire to work. If woodcutting is the thing that seperates these three people from the lazy vodka-drunks who visit the soup kitchen in the same wing of the house, then all the better. This piece is a stereo mix-down of a 6-channel recording using contact and stereo condensor mikes to capture the various ambient and concrete sounds of the boiler room, and is dedicated to Astra, Gints and Viktors--for keeping us warm.

Cicadas and small children play in the forest near a windy beach on Maraj

Insecticoid travellers of deep space communicate through the bush near our campsite en route to the Acoustic Space Lab event in Latvia.

Train stations... what they represent, such as an infinite possibilities of destinations and the chance for mobility and freedom, appeal to me deeply. Here is a small selection of the locations one can reach from Bratislava Hlavna Stanica.