Field Recording Series by Gruenrekorder, ISBN-13: 978-8409128617, English, 264 pages, 2019, Germany

It is perhaps surprising that experimental music labels have recently produced some of the most interesting experiments in print publishing. Maybe the need to combine specific sounds with printed pages has instigated a conceptual approach even in their production, and many of the results speak for themselves. Mikel R. Nieto released “Dark Sound“ in 2016, which was printed black on black with a black CD, in a perfectly consistent work inspired by what the oil business did to Ecuadorian environment. This book seems to be the other missing half of that publication, printed in the lightest possible grey (almost white) on white pages and accompanied by a transparent flexi-disc with the sound of snow falling in the Finnish landscape, recorded using special microphones. The different texts are a seminal introduction by Ingold about the main subjects, a multifaceted explanation on ‘nothingness’ articulated by Cardo and a four part text by Nieto, whose last is a deletionist approach to John Cage’s “Lecture on Nothing,” leaving only punctuation marks and the last sentence of the original text. This book also speaks about ‘loss’ as Dark Sound did: the disappearance of sounds (silence), landscape (below the snow), while each listening of the flexi-disc physically ‘destroys the sound”. A sound research project remarkably combining very coherent and complementary content in its form.