Running Time:

72 min

Release Date:

November 2010

Recording Location:

Demerkazik Gorge, Taurus Mountains, Southern Turkey.
See on Google Earth

Echoes in a Secret Gorge

In a dramatic gorge, hidden deep in Turkey's Taurus Mountains, we discover a wondrous symphony of natural sounds.

In the darkness, a Rock Thrush begins the dawn chorus. The piping calls of a Scops Owl echo eerily off the rocks walls, and whistles from rare Snowcocks drift down from icy crags near the snowline. Eventually, the whole gorge reverberates with birdsong, including the calls of a majestic Golden Eagle as it soars above the ridge lines, and the barking of Ibex as they negotiate the precipitous cliffs.

In the late afternoon, Alpine Swifts twitter animatedly during playful aerobatics, their wings whistling as they swoop overhead. As evening falls, an extraordinary symphony of sheep bells echoes in the natural amphitheatre.

This is a hauntingly beautiful recording from a secret landscape.

Audio sample of this album

1.

The First Birdsong of the Predawn: Rock Thrush

3.28

2.

Reverberations off the Rock Walls: Scops Owl

4.27

3.

A Voice drifting down from the High Crags: Caspian Snowcock

14.11

4.

Sentinels against the Skyline: Chukars

4.56

5.

Daylight Reaches the Depths of the Gorge: Great Tit and Wrens

7.55

6.

Black Redstart, Ibex and Red-fronted Serins

4.50

7.

Soaring above the Peaks: Golden Eagle and Choughs

5.22

8.

Aerial Acrobatics in the Late Afternoon: Alpine Swifts

16.24

9.

From the High Pastures: A Symphony of Sheep Bells

10.21

This album on our blog

Birdsong echoing in Demerkazik Gorge

It is 5am, icy cold, and as the first birdsong begins the dawn chorus, I have the feeling we've stumbled upon our most interesting recording location in Turkey thus far. Which is utterly unexpe...

Read more >
A Symphony of Sheep Bells on summer pastures in Turkey

The narrow valley floors near Demerkazik in the Aladağlar Range in Turkey are used as summer pastures for sheep and cattle. Exploring one valley, we came upon a flock of sheep and thei...

Read more >

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About the audio formats

Mp3:

Mp3 is a universal audio format, playable on iPods, computers, media players and mobile phones.

Mp3 is a compressed format, allowing smaller filesizes, offering faster download times and requiring less storage space on players, but at some expense to the audio quality. Many listeners can't really hear the difference between mp3 and full CD-quality audio, and hence its convenience has lead to it becoming the default option for audio.

Our albums are generally encoded at around 256kbps (sometimes with VBR), balancing optimal audio quality without blowing out filesizes excessively. We encode using the Fraunhoffer algorithm, which preserves more detail in the human audible range than the lame encoder.

Our mp3 files are free of any DRM (digital rights management), so you can transfer them to any of your media technology. You've paid for them, they're yours for your personal use without restriction.

Mp3 files can be burned to disc, either as an mp3 disc, or an audio CD after converting them to a standard audio (.wav or .aif) format first.

FLAC:

FLAC is a high-quality audio format, allowing CD-resolution audio. It is ideal if you wish to burn your files to a CDR, or listen over a high resolution audio system. However files usually require special decoding by the user before playing or burning to disc.

FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) is a LOSSLESS compressed audio format. This means that it preserves the full audio quality of a CD, but optimises the filesize for downloading. Typically, file sizes of around 60% are achieved without any degradation or loss of audio quality from the source files at the CD standard of 16bit/44.1kHz.

Obviously the file sizes are larger than for the mp3 version - usually around 300-400Mb for an album, compared to 100Mb for an mp3 album.

In addition, you'll need to know what to do with the files once you've downloaded them. In most cases you'll want to decode the files to wav or aiff, either to import into programs like iTunes, or burn to CDR. Some programs will play flac files natively.

There is a lot of information about flac online (eg: http://flac.sourceforge.net/)