As someone who is infatuated with listening to and making field recordings, I had my mind blown by this article. While recording my surroundings every once in a while can be fascinating and fun, I can’t imagine having every single facet of my life recorded onto some medium. It’d be a chore to record every inter-personal communication (verbal and digital), as well as photograph all the images I see and record the sounds I hear. Yet, the ability to do so is not only becoming a reality, it’s apparently going to be quite easy. Microsoft’s MyLifeBits project is trying to enable us all to walk around with a terabyte of storage in our phones, computers and other portable devices within the next ten years, thus ensuring the capability to record our entire lives.

On the topic of field recordings, I’d like to quickly plug two records I was turned onto this past week.

The Cherry Beach Project – Silo II – Mystery Sea Records, the label that focuses specifically on limited CD-Rs containing “soundmantras” that enable artists to share recordings related to WATER. The Cherry Beach project is a Canadian duo who recorded natural sounds in an industrial silo in Toronto. The place is known as being a discreet locale where “off the record” police activities and sundry illegal acitivities occur. The sounds they captured for Silo II include droplets of water and low mechanical rumbles of unknown origins. It’s a spooky, wonderful late night listening experience. The CD-R is limited to 100 copies, so buy yours now. Check out two audio samples (one, two), or seek out the label on MySpace.

Great Fences of Australia – John Rose and Hollis Taylor, two violinists from Australia, have spent the last five years traveling tens of thousands of miles across the outback recording the unique sounds of bowed fences that stretch through every state and territory on the continent. Think about the beautiful sound of a resonating stringed instrument, and then imagine that the strings were hundreds of kilometers long. Imagine how intense that would sound? Well, now you can hear it. I’ve only heard samples to this point, but it was mind-blowing. Each CD also comes boxed with a strip of barbed wire. No joke. Here’s a track called “Electric Fence”.

- You can watch a slightly compressed version of The Best Podcast You Have: Circulations Amethyst Episode 4 video podcast by clicking here and transporting yourself to the official podcast MySpace profile. I think a larger flash movie/player version should be available in the coming days or weeks.

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