Off on tour again
Plus a singing workshop & podcasts to listen to
Welcome to new and old subscribers. This is a monthly newsletter where I share updates on my projects, as well as field recordings, music and more.
I’ve introduced a new paid tier, ‘The Listening Circle’ - this is an extra newsletter each month where I will share a notebook of music, films, books and other things I’ve been enjoying. The first one will come out in the next couple of days, so if you’d like to subscribe, it’s £3.50 a month, roughly the price of a coffee, and a lovely way to support my work.
The main newsletter will continue to be free and accessible, so if you’re on the free tier, you’ll still receive regular stories, updates and field recordings. I really appreciate you being here.
If you’d like to upgrade, you can do so here:
Before I jump into updates, I just want to draw attention to a bird that has returned to the UK. Over the last few week, they’ve been swooping over my garden as I’ve attempted to keep the plants hydrated in this recent sweltering heat.
Swifts are small, dark birds, with wings shaped like sickles, allowing them to swerve and glide through the air effortlessly. Folklore gifted them the title ‘devil’s bird’, due to their high-pitched screeching sound. Their collective noun is a “scream” of swifts.
Amazingly, they spend most of the time on the wing - with some spending more than 99% of their 10 month non-breeding period in the air. They feed, drink, sleep and even mate in flight.
They are migratory birds, flying thousands of kilometres from Africa to the UK each year in early May, and heading back in late summer. Sadly, due to loss of habitat, decline in insect numbers and climate change, their numbers are dwindling, and they are now on the UK’s Rest List of Birds of Conservation Concern. To help swifts, we can introduce ‘swift bricks’ and boxes, as well as leave parts of gardens a bit wilder to promote insect populations.
Here is a scream of swifts flying over my garden in SE London:
Now… onto the announcements:
Stornoway UK tour
I’m excited to share that I’ll be supporting the band Stornoway on their UK tour in October and February. We’ll be heading to 14 locations across the UK. It was a joy to support Stornoway at the Norwich and Norfolk Festival a couple of weeks ago. Their music is often nature-inspired, with lots of lovely harmonies!
I will bring my solo set, featuring layered vocals, synths, live looping and my own field recordings collected across the UK and beyond. It’s inspired by my BBC Radio 4 documentary Shifting Soundscapes, in which I revisit locations recorded by audio naturalist Martyn Stewart (The Listening Planet) 50 years ago.
Summer singing workshop
I’ll be facilitating a one-off singing workshop with the choir SYRINX on Tuesday 18th August. It’ll be a fun opportunity to do some group singing and is open to all!
The Adam Buxton Podcast
Back in 2024, my band and I performed as part of Adam Buxton’s live podcast at the Bristol Beacon, and I was so pleased that it came out online last week. I’ve been listening to Adam Buxton’s podcast since my late teens, and it was an absolute pinch-me moment to be asked to perform on it. It was the largest gig I had done up to that point, so I was incredibly excited and nervous, and grateful to have my friends and collaborators Daisy Jean Russell and Jacob Norris play with me.
We perform a couple of times across the episode, I shared my underwater sound recordings, and we hear lots of great anecdotes from Adam Buxton and the podcast guest, comedian Bridget Christie.
Get Birding with Sean Bean
I was also interviewed for the Get Birding podcast with Sean Bean. I met up with Hana the producer, and she interviewed me about field recording, my work with audio naturalist Martyn Stewart, and how I started identifying birdsong. Listen/watch here (also available wherever you get your podcasts):
Interviewing Max Porter
As you might know, I present and produce ‘Found Sounds’, a monthly episode of Ffern’s podcast ‘As the Season Turns’. Each month I travel to a new place in the UK and interview someone whose work is inspired by the landscape, folklore or heritage crafts. This month, I interviewed critically-acclaimed author Max Porter in Bath. We talked about how the landscape shapes his work, the process of writing and the interplay between the ordinary and fantastical. In the episode, Max also reads out the piece he wrote for Ffern’s spring film ‘This Wild Land’, which features Clare Foy and the wildlife at Knepp Wildland.
Thank you for your continued support!
Take care,
Alice
Alice is the coolest