Every field recording is a virtual reality. Joshua Bonnetta understands that precept: The Canadian artist eschews “authentic” reproductions of any space, openly embracing subjectivity. “I abstract the sounds,” Bonnetta has said of his 2016 album Lago, “so that they would align more with my experience and the feeling of what I got from that place.” A personal perspective comes to the fore in his experimental documentaries, too. El Mar La Mar, his 2017 collaboration with director J.P. Sniadecki, placed oral histories alongside audio of the Sonoran desert, painting the U.S.-Mexico border as a landscape of trauma and bureaucratic racism. In 2020’s The Two Sights, he portrayed the epistemological reality of clairvoyant townspeople in the Outer Hebrides by eschewing diegetic sound. More than most field recordists, Bonnetta finds truth in the edit.
The impossibility of objectivity is a central idea in The Pines, Bonnetta’s monumental four-disc, four-hour album. Its premise sounds like a lark: Over a year, he recorded 8,760 hours of material from a single pine tree in upstate New York. Utilizing a passive monitoring device primarily meant for conservation research, he left the recorder alone for prolonged stretches of time, visiting periodically only to change the batteries and storage cards. After poring over his material, he spent three years constructing pieces that represent each season. The listening experience is dense but easy, obvious yet shrouded in mystique.
It can be daunting to press play on an album so large in scope, but the tracks flow smoothly and capture an incredibly active locale rife with varied textures. The beginning of “Spring” features the magnified sounds of something creaking—a result of the microphone’s uncommon vantage—and it feels uncanny the way it recalls the noise of a slowly opening door. This teasing unknowability lurks amid the more standard sounds of birds, animals, and water. There’s a low rumbling sound that I can only describe as a quickly dribbled basketball, and its repeated presence throughout the hour-long track is confounding. When a cloud of muted uproar arrives 42 minutes in, it’s more than likely a multitude of animals making communal noise, but it also feels like the distant sound of a cheering crowd. Such ambiguity makes The Pines a constant thrill.
It is difficult to tell if Bonnetta simply stitched together waveforms in a linear fashion, or layered multiple noises from different moments. Sometimes we hear the lovely sound of a black-capped chickadee, its buoying melodic phrase puncturing the noise of other birdsong. It’s akin to a riveting ensemble piece, but the richness of sound and species feels almost too dense—it could very well be a collage of pre-recorded sound, or a testament to how removed humans are from nature. Our invasiveness also comes to mind when we hear a noisy vehicle pierce the early minutes of “Summer”; very few birds can be heard at all. When rain pours down at the end of the track, animals falling silent as they take cover or scurry away from the soundfield, it is tempting to see humanity’s impact as similarly transformative.
