One man spent an entire year recording a pine tree. Hear the results as FOUR album epic is released

We’ve all listened to records where a band’s performance could be best described as ‘wooden’ but this is ridiculous Ambient sound artist Joshua Bonnetta has just released four albums of the sounds from a single tree – a project that’s taken him four years to complete and created 8,760 hours of audio.

And it’s not the first time that Bonnetta has dabbled with long-form recordings that are, perhaps, rather lacking in verse, chorus, build or drop.

While living in the Outer Hebrides between 2017 and 2019, he spent a month live radio broadcasting the output from his hydrophone – an underwater mic – which he’d placed by a sea loch adjacent to the port of Lochmaddy on the island of North Uist. The result was a sound installation he christened Brackish.

“I started to leave the recorder for a day or two, then it just got longer,” he told The Guardian. “Amazing things happen when you’re not there to interfere… This allows you a different, very privileged window into the space.”

Thus, upon moving to Ithaca, New York, Bonnetta was in the mood for a similar quest and after hearing wolves and coyotes at night in the woods with friends he decided to get a little closer to the action.

Bonnetta picked a remote spot, selected a tree and lashed a digital recorder and mic set up 10ft up and hit record… And 12 months later – he recorded between May 2021 and April 2022 – the project that would become The Pines was finished.

Treesy like Sunday Morning…

And while this may sound like the simplest ever way to write, record, produce and release four albums, never forget that Bonnetta has had to work hard for his spoils.

Firstly, every few weeks he would have to return to his hidden recorder, change its battery, swap its SD card and repair or replace any damage to his microphone’s pop shields, which the local chipmunks “got obsessed with”.

Then with 8,760 hours of recordings, there’s the small matter of editing it, a process that would take – gulp – three years, with the painstaking work, logging and slicing the recordings competing with his day job. “I would come home after work like, ‘OK, I’m gonna work on the tree,’” he explains.

And never the shirker, Bonnetta’s pursuit of perfection led him to tinker with his creations further.

In order to add more depth and realism to the sound, Bonnetta then multi-tracked his recordings, layering and mixing the sound of the tree (and other associated nearby events) from different time periods for maximum impact. Thus you could be listening to a creak from January while simultaneously enjoying the rainfall from July.

And “don’t fall asleep,” Bonnetta warns. Because “there’s some pretty gnarly raccoon!”

Call the copse…

And with The Pines finally… out there, what next for the adventurous field recorder with time on his hands?

Next he’ll be taking on the Alps… “[Mount Hochstaufen] has little earthquakes every time there’s heavy rainfall,” he explains. Plus there’s an audiovisual portrait of the Bavarian forest at night, a film about the bioacoustic scientists on Easter Island's, Rapa Nui and a project to capture his new home city of Munich.

“I’ve never lived in Europe before, where you can hear bells from all the different neighbourhoods and sense the distance,” he says. “It’s really beautiful to have that sense of space through local sounds.”

The Pines is out now in high-quality MP3, FLAC and more, available for download in 24-bit/48kHz and on four CDs.