An-Ting :: Lost Communications (Self Released)

Music for contemplating our winged companions who have given us so much inspiration, reminding us that in our dreams and meditations we all have wings to fly.

The language of birds

Bird is the word. Binaural recordings of bird songs mix with the chitter-chatter of relentless hammerhead beats in this drum and drone driven album from the London based Chinese composer An-ting 安婷. The field recordings are her own and were collected on her travels around Asia and the United Kingdom, and expertly crafted into a suite of music that allows the listener to take flight into a world where music descends from tree branches, telephone wires, and the high perches of our buildings. It’s feathered music of beaks and clouds that she compounds for us, so we can better understand the dawn song, dusk song, the language of birds.

It starts softly like bird song does in the morning, the original alarm clocks that did not bleep in annoyance, but chirped us awake in a resplendent chorus calling us back-from-into the land of dreams. The first song “Blackcap,” is gentle like the pitter patter of warm rain that forms a part of its backdrop. The drones aren’t as dark as they will become, but are at first ethereal and whimsical. Drums click on after we’re drawn into this world, with “Willow Tit.” The bird has more of a croak sound, and it’s a little ominous. The rain might be getting heavier. The beats certainly are, and the synthesizers begin to trill in a way that are as abstract as they are absorbing.

The chirps on “Eurasian Wren” are real tweeter tweakers. This was the track that made me fall in love with the album, making it a highlight among all the new music I was turned on to in 2024. An-Ting matches it with metallic drum hits and heavy bass drops, and a tremolo laden synth lead. Ambient country group SUSS released an album called Birds & Beasts last year. This album could have easily been called Birds & Beats. The natural and the technological merge here in a seamless continuum. Humanity is a part of nature, and our tools come from the world, even as our machines tend to disconnect us from nature, even as they extend us around the world. Here the electronical and the biological form a continuum. The perfect pulse of the rhythms and tones is complementary to the field recordings. Together they are one. A form of sacred randomness expressing infinite possibility in multiplicity.

Tintinnabulated ring-modulation and throbbing oscillation ::

“Chiffchaff” enters a world of tintinnabulated ring-modulation and throbbing oscillation. Like the birds, the notes are pitch bent and go up and down, excited, exuberant. “Taiwan Yuhina” has more of a shuffling vibe over top of spaced-out low-key noise excursions. It’s a liturgy for poet devotees of the ancient singers who inspired our own singing.

“Black Collared Starling” exists in a dark ambient vein of unsettling textures and creakiness. There are so many creaks that it could easily be right at home on a Nurse With Wound record. These creaks match the slow emergence of caws and crows from the bird, along shifting abysmal textures and human voices, horns, street traffic. This is an urban bird, showing again the continuity of nature, even in places of heavy human population like Hong Kong, where this bird was heard. Evanescent and bright lines end the song on a lighter note. Neon city rain.

The “Red Whiskered Bulbul” is the last bird featured and the last song. It starts with what sounds like a woodpecker or bouncing (Bucephalus) ball. The hi-hats and cymbals dance between the airy chatter emerging from the skies. After all, this is air music. Sky music. Music for contemplating our winged companions who have given us so much inspiration, reminding us that in our dreams and meditations we all have wings to fly.

“We live with other creatures on earth and are surrounded by all different sounds. Through Lost Communications, I blend the birdsongs with my artistic expression to introduce people to these complex languages and nonhuman voices. I hope this will make us more aware of different life forms on this planet and inspire greater kindness to the earth.” ~An-Ting

Lost Communications 失絡之聲 is available on Bandcamp.