This year World Listening Day is centred around the thoughts of renowned field recordist and sound artist Annea Lockwood.

She set out the ideas behind the theme ‘Listening with …’
– listening with the neighbourhood
– at midnight, and again at dawn.
– Listening with an awareness that all around you are other life-forms simultaneously listening and sensing with you – plant roots, owls, cicadas, voles – mutually intertwined within the web of vibrations which animate and surround our planet.

I have created sound pictures for World Listening Day for the past 4 years and this years piece is definitely one created with an awareness to other life forms in my neighbourhood, as it is about the wasp nest that is sitting under the eaves of my home.
Over the past few weeks I have been watching the constant comings and goings and nest building of the wasps and decided to use field recordings combined with sound manipulation and electronic music to create ‘Nest’.

‘Nest’ is an imaginary sound picture of a wasp flying into and moving through the complex structure the colony have built. The piece imagines in sound the colony, their mandibles chewing, wings buzzing, construction and communicating with each other – all building paper walls of immense complexity and beauty, like an alien world.

As with most of my pieces, this is best listened via headphones to get the full effect.

Artwork by Museleon based on a photograph by David Hablutzel on Pixabay.