Running Time:

75 min

Release Date:

June 2012

Recording Location:

Drevdagan, Sweden.
View on Google Earth

If you like this album,
we also recommend:

Taiga - Europe's Boreal Wilderness

Taiga - the great forests of the far north, the most extensive habitat on earth.

Here the landscape is vast; a mosaic of conifer forest and sodden peatbogs, threaded with streams and lakes.

As the blue light of a midsummer dawn silhouettes the landscape, Tree Pipits and Willow Warblers sing melodiously from song perches atop tall conifers. Bramblings and small parties of Siskins flit overhead, filling the air with their delicate calls.

Across open ground drift the eerie calls of whimbrels and the sharp piping of a greenshank. Snipe display in flight, and ducks splash-land on open water.

As wind stirs the treetops, a lone redstart sings, its intricate trills fragile against the elements.

Sarah comments:

"We made these recordings on the high plains of the Scandinavian upland. Based at a small hut on the edge of a vast wilderness area, each day we would set out at midnight to walk into this area to record and photograph. Despite being midsummer, the air was cool and snow seemed an ever-present possibility.

It was a place of elemental beauty - a landscape animated by wind and birdsong and the flow of water. Silence was also a presence; distant moose grazing, a rare Siberian Jay perched overhead or a beaver gliding silently upstream.

Sounds drifted from far off in the still air, and in this recording you can hear the immensity of the northern wilderness."

 

Andrew and Sarah take you track by track through this album.

Audio sample of this album

1.

Tree Pipit and Willow Warbler Sing in the Midsummer Dawn Twilight

13.56

2.

Edge of the Peatmarsh

13.04

3.

Snipe Display Flight

2.04

4.

Siskins, Bramblings and Fieldfares

24.17

5.

Cries of Whimbrels

16.28

6.

A Redstart in the Wind

5.54

This album on our blog

Redstart song heard on the Scandianavian Taiga

This last week, Sarah and I have spent at the small village of Drevdagen, in the highlands near the Norwegian border. The upland taiga of Sweden is so beautiful - wild and desolate, yet deli...

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/)