205: How Our Birds Sing, Vol. 1, recorded by Hans A. Traber

Hans A. Traber (Switzerland)
How Our Birds Sing, Vol. 1 (1988)
32 tracks, 52 minutes
Spotify

It’s my birthday! So as a treat to myself I’m actually picking today’s album rather than letting the robot decide, and I’ve gone for something a bit different.

It’s just a bunch of birds!

I love the sound of birdsong. I feel like it has a real restorative quality to it. When I lived in Berlin, a few times a year my job required me to be getting home at about 4 or 5 o’clock in the morning after a really long and intense day at work. To be walking home through the communal garden at that time to a complete cacophony of what sounded like hundreds of birds after a whole day of stress was like a beautiful massage for the mind, and I’d often just sit there with them for half an hour, letting the sounds bathe me before heading to bed. Now I live in London, and there are far fewer birds here. When I can, I cycle into the countryside to enjoy the quiet…and it’s interesting that the birdsong never intrudes into this quiet, it never registers as ‘noise.’ Those beautiful calls fill up my soul, ready to come back to the city and run on that as fuel.

And when that isn’t possible…that’s when Hans Traber’s work comes in. There are actually quite a few different recordings that I could have listed here (including extended Youtube videos of dawn choruses), but the variety of How Our Birds Sing is really lovely. The 32* birds recorded here are from Central Europe, so although most of them are the same as you’ll hear in the UK, including superstars such as the robin, the blackbird and the wren, there’s also a few that are more foreign to these shores, including the usually elusive nightingale.

It is truly lovely to sit and appreciate these recordings for the sounds they contain. Some are simple and short chirrups, squeaks and bleeps, others are virtuosic and long, taking wild and sometimes unpredictable turns while remaining reminiscent of human music. It’s mad when you think that it’s all basically small feathery things bellowing “fuck me” or “fuck off” isn’t it? At least they have the decency to be poetic about it.

I don’t know whether you’ll have the same reaction to these birds as I do. It may be because I’ve come from a rural area to a big and busy city; your mileage may vary. But whether or not you listen to this album, I urge you to get up (or, more fun, stay up) to see a dawn chorus every so often and revel in the sheer mastery of the bird world. Nature provides its own Good Albums, we only try our best to imitate it.

*There’s another 75 recordings across the other three volumes too!