'Chipmunks were obsessed with my mics': the man who recorded a tree for a year

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https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/apr/29/chipmunks-mics-joshua-bonnetta-who-recorded-a-tree-for-a-year

‘Chipmunks were obsessed with my mics’: the man who recorded a tree for a year

Joshua Bonnetta spent 8,760 hours recording a pine – then honed it down into a four-hour album full of creatures, cracking branches and quite possibly the sound of leaves growing

Claire Biddles
Tue 29 Apr 2025 10.12 EDT

What does a landscape sound like when it’s not being listened to? This philosophical question was a catalyst for film-maker and artist Joshua Bonnetta, who has distilled a year of recordings from a single tree in upstate New York – that’s 8,760 hours – into a four-hour album, The Pines. As Robert Macfarlane writes in his accompanying essay, The Pines is a reminder of the natural world’s “sheer, miraculous busyness”, its “froth of signals and noise”. It is rich with poetic meaning, and resonant amid the climate emergency.
“It started as a personal thing,” Bonnetta explains from his studio in Munich, where he relocated from the US in 2022. For over 20 years he has made sonic records of places as private mementos, but recent experiments with long-form field recording led him to push himself “to document this place in the deepest way I could”. On a residency in the Outer Hebrides between 2017 and 2019, Bonnetta made the sound installation Brackish, a month-long continuous radio broadcast from a weather-resistant hydrophone – an underwater mic – by a loch. “I started to leave the recorder for a day or two, then it just got longer,” he says. “Amazing things happen when you’re not there to interfere … This allows you a different, very privileged window into the space.”

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There is a generosity in Bonnetta’s work; its offer of time to spend within a landscape, which gets infused with personal meaning. But heed his warning before listening to The Pines: “Just don’t fall asleep,” he says, because “there’s some pretty gnarly raccoon!”

The Pines is out now on Shelter Press records

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