Early Eckensee

In Feb­ru­ary, I found myself work­ing a week in Stuttgart. This came on the tail end of an intense peri­od of work and trav­el — and it was, in fact, the last one since, as by that time Baden-Würt­tem­berg already reg­is­tered cas­es of COVID-19 and the coun­try would soon go into lockdown.

This was record­ed ear­ly in the morn­ing, as the sun rose over the Ober­er Schloß­garten, between the Staat­sop­er and the Land­tag. You hear one ear­ly-morn­ing jog­ger and a smat­ter­ing of dis­tant chat­ter, but the sound­scape is most­ly dom­i­nat­ed by the birds and oth­er ani­mals that nest and frol­ic around the Eck­ensee. The city had not yet awok­en; this win­dow records a slice of the grad­ual rein­tro­duc­tion of the human. And it is from this sit­u­a­tion that the curi­ous dra­matur­gy of the record­ing (which is unedit­ed in its tem­po­ral unfold­ing) emerges: these two lay­ers coex­ist not in the other’s neg­a­tive space — nor is the human here drown­ing out the ani­mal — but their utter­ances seem to clus­ter togeth­er in time.

This sound­scape was record­ed on a Zoom H2n with a Pri­mo ECM172 omni microphone.