Oaka Interviews #2 - Nathan Moody
Welcome to the next instalment of Oaka Interviews, I have been inviting fellow field recordists, sound designers, musicians and artists to chat about their relationship to sound and field recording. Next up in line is sound designer, Nathan Moody….
Can you describe your practice? Where are you based? What areas of sound and music do you enjoy exploring?
I am a sound designer and an experimental musician; I work primarily in interactive audio, but I've also worked with dialogue, Foley, sound design, and mixing for all sorts of linear media, from podcasts to film. I like exploring the extremes: quiet and loud, subtle and brash, atonal and harmonic, clean and distorted. I record almost equally in my home studio and in the field.
I also choose to believe that there are no hard borders between music and sound design. I approach ambiences like scoring, just with diegetic sounds. I use field recordings in my musical works all the time, even building custom Aeolian harps and selling recordings of them both as sound libraries and albums. I build a lot of contraptions and my own instruments, and contact microphones are a big part of recording those objects.
I've released almost 30 albums in the last two-plus decades, ranging from purely electronic to purely field recording and everything in between. I take a strange glee in making sure my listeners can't anticipate what my next project will sound like; that keeps my core follower count small, but they get it, and are into it, and collect almost everything I make. I've been told by listeners that it all sounds like "me," regardless of what I use for instrumentation or tools, so I suppose that's a sign that there's some fundamental aesthetic that feels unified. I find that fascinating. While a lot of my music tends to be dark in tone, I've been told that the joy in its making can be heard in the final result. I use my personal art as a form of catharsis, but I take great love and happiness in, and during, its creation.
Do you use field recording in your practice? If so, how? How do you think the use of field recording influences the listener?
Field recording is an integral part of everything I do. Not being in the studio turns on a different kind of filter for what I intend to record, and my choices in the field are very different than how I might record an instrument or prop in the studio. That clearly translates into a different listener experience...how, I'm not entirely sure, being the producer and not the listener!
There's always an editorial process in field recording, starting with even deciding what to record at all. That is a moment of editing, of choosing what to present and what to de-emphasize or not capture. Depending on my goals, that could be because I have a "shopping list" of sounds to attempt to capture, or it might simply be that a sound stage or juxtaposition captures my fancy.
Where do you draw your inspiration from? Do you find you are drawn to recording naturally occurring sounds or urban environments? Why do you think you might sway in a particular direction?
I take the greatest inspiration from the hidden sounds things make, most often when they are recorded or performed in ways that are not related to their original use or intent. Getting odd perspectives on natural phenomena, using contact microphones, using found objects, putting microphones in weirdly resonant places...those are all things that my own influences and heroes have done, and I've always had that be a core part of my practice. It's a nice way to balance out doing things the "right" way, like capturing a standard ambience for a film; sometimes using a mic that seems "wrong" can be an ear-opening experiment with positive results.
All that is to say that I think a sense of play – beginner's mind, experimentation, "what would happen if..?" – is something I am always chasing after, and is important to retain as one gets older.
What direction do you see your work going in the future? What are you looking forward to exploring next?
I'm facing a couple of directions, actually: I can work solo on a project, soup to nuts, because I'm a lifelong generalist. That's a certain sort of challenge and fun, and is getting easier the older I get. This is also how I typically work on my own musical and artistic projects.
But the more I work in sound, at the same time I'm wondering if my best work is when I help other people do their best work. I've always enjoyed mentoring, but in the last five years I've moved more towards mixing, mastering, and sound library releases in addition to my personal artistic practice. Whether it's providing unique core ingredients or helping the final polish, I hope that I get to collaborate with more and more colleagues as time goes on, building sonic experiences that are only possible as a team effort. Plus, other people push me farther outside of my comfort zone than I do, which is critical for anyone's artistic and technical development.
You can check out Nathan’s work here:
https://noisejockey.net/ - Sound Design
https://obsidiansound.net/ - Mastering
