58.10066889887569, 26.556893513707646
88MHz



Field Notes





“Field recording, for me, can be a two-way conversation - an idea sparked by a 1960s BBC film in which David Attenborough lured unseen monkeys from the canopy by playing their own calls back to them. That simple act of “talking” rather than merely documenting reshaped how I think about microphones, tape and place. Silent Spring asks visitors to do something similar: animate the forest by giving energy to the birds’ voices.

A second catalyst came the moment I arrived in Helsinki and heard bird calls played through the airport speakers. I found the same gentle soundtracks played in Finnish hotels and other public spaces. Those polished loops, meant to soothe, convinced me to push in the opposite direction. The birds in Silent Spring do not provide spa ambience; they surface through static, abrupt tape cuts and microsound artifacts precisely so the listener cannot glide past them.

Each edited loop is re-contextualised with varispeed, splicing and letting blips of FM hiss eclipse the calls entirely. By foregrounding noise (the very stuff a radio dial usually rejects) we underline that habitat loss and signal loss are inseparable.

If a walk along the path feels unsettled rather than idyllic, the work is succeeding. The goal is not to decorate nature but to expose its current frequency. Fragile, fractured, and dependent on our willingness to crank a handle and keep the conversation alive.”

- Iris Voss


“I’ve always seen radio not as a medium of nostalgia, but as a haunted space - a flickering ghost band where lost voices echo. That fascination started with my grandfather’s tales of the Royal Corps of Signals in Burma in WW2, and deepened through years of building spatial sound systems in museums and galleries, composing and producing music and creating multidimensional soundbeds for augmented virtual and extended reality apps. For Silent Spring, I wanted to make something fragile: a temporary broadcast from the edge of extinction.

What if the forest could tune into us as much as we into it? That question drove the project’s architecture. I sourced second-hand radios not for aesthetic charm but because they arrive already scarred - bodies marked by time, ready to host the fading songs of Estonia’s most threatened birds.

This is rupture and glitch. The distorted decay of magnetic tape, the erratic buzz of fading FM drift. If the experience feels slightly broken, it’s because the world is. Within that interference lies a proposition: that the act of listening can still hold agency. That we might - just might - tune back in.”

- Andrew Melchior