Genius multi-instrumentalist Eric Dolphy loved to jam with birds. He would sit on his porch in California and play flute to accompany the songs wafting through in the trees of his backyard. Dolphy found that if he listened closely, he could detect the patterns in the chorus of bird chirps, and he was inspired by the way these melodies included notes that landed in between the ridged pitch delineations of his flute.

In his later years, composer John Cage did not own a record player or a radio. He found the idea of pre-recorded music to be unbearably dull, and he indulged his listening needs by tuning into the traffic noise beneath his New York apartment. Sirens, voices, tire squeals and engines-- though man-made, the sounds were assembled with the indeterminism of nature, a quality Cage sought to emulate by consulting the I Ching when structuring his own compositions.

What we learn from Dolphy and Cage is that to make music, you first have to listen. For a series they called Met Life, Chicago label Locust Music asked six artists to listen, record, listen again, respond, and then compose. Here's how it worked: The artists were directed to make a field recording ranging from 10 to 20 minutes and then record a "response" (this could be interpreted any number of ways) to said field recording. The six lovingly packaged CDs of the series collect the results of these experiments. The first volume of the series, reviewed earlier for Pitchfork by Andy Beta, was Keith Fullerton Whitman's fine Dartmouth Street Underpass.

Au: Recycling
The Hague provides the roadways, brass band parades, favorite pubs, and civilian chatter that Au capture over the course of their 16-minute active field recording-- "active" because the duo of Jan Borchers and Paul Klaui are riding microphone-equipped bicycles throughout the city to mine its sounds. Much more than the other releases in the Met Life series, Au's recording, "Cycling", is a remarkably cinematic one: On one hand, they can't control the sounds that occur in the city, but on the other they can and do film them discriminately to make sure at least one sound is more prominent than the rest-- as proof, it sounds like they even brake for a few moments to give the brass fanfares their due. Other times, we only hear a pleasant spray of spinning spokes, and from this we may assume Au are going out of their way to present dynamically different environments in The Hague.

The field recording benefits from their smart sculpts. Their subsequent remix, "Recycling", does not alter the time or continuity of the original. Instead, Au opt for complementary ambient stylings via Borchers' gentle guitar line and Klaui's electronics, which are alternately pleasant to correspond with the loud moments on "Cycling" that speak for themselves, and brooding to accompany less momentous passages that are so quiet it's kind of creepy.

Reynols: Rampotanza Grodo Rempelente
The field recording here is no great shakes. To bring the sound of the street to life you need a certain amount of fidelity, and this walk among construction workers in Buenos Aires sounds vague and distant. It was recorded in 1994, perhaps on substandard equipment. The best that can be said of it is that there seems to be a lot going on back there somewhere, and listening to the field recording while walking around your own city can be profoundly disorienting.

The response track compensates to a degree. It begins with creaks and groans, as the piercing jackhammer sounds and voices calling out to be heard above the traffic seem are tucked into place amid surges of feedback. And the last half finds the street noise joining the three men of Reynols in a strange jam that could be the soundtrack to a circus nightmare. Some machine clanking occasionally stands in for percussion, and the voices of the workers are shaped to fit with Reynols' warped vision. But most of the sound is Reynols going it alone, performing a surreal march back through the same torn-up streets.

Erdem Helvacioglu: A Walk Through the Bazaar
An open marketplace in Istanbul is Erdem Helvacioglu's chosen setting. Helvacioglu captures the overlapping voices and middle-distance commotion beautifully. The clear and detailed audio snapshot, which features vendors hawking their wares, families humming together as they stroll past, and music bleeding in from a nearby boombox, is as richly revealing as a well-framed photograph. The opening section of the response track finds Helvacioglu crafting his own soundscape by mixing beautiful drones with well-placed samples from the bazaar. Eventually, some beats join in and the track grows upbeat and hectic, but Helvacioglu is careful to preserve the dreamy mood established by the introduction. The effect of hearing voices that became so familiar in the opening track blending with the music is striking, like the musical realization of a recovered memory.

Chris Delaurenti: The Night I Met Maria C_____
It's a shame that this disc is such a one-trick pony: Seattle's Chris Delaurenti first records 16 minutes at the Wallingford Transfer Station, a waste factory, and then for his response piece, pieces together the most salient parts of a night out drinking-- getting "wasted". That Delaurenti makes the pun is bad enough; that he actualizes it to this extent is almost completely asinine. The content of both recordings makes for some of the series' most boring stuff, though content here was always secondary to Delaurenti's silly joke. That said, the bit where Delaurenti records himself urinating is, to a degree, touching.

Matmos: Rat Relocation Program
When a street rat crashed the Matmos pad, made noise late at night, and nibbled away at their food and threads, the duo of Drew Daniel and Martin Schmidt were faced with potential hypocrisy-- they couldn't kill the rodent because, in fact, they were keeping another as a pet. As a compromise, they decided to catch it in a cage and record its protests: angry metallic rattling, pained wails, and the long and terrifying silence that spans their irregularity. It's a torturous listen.

The relationship between vast silence and the rat's shrill rant becomes the centerpoint for Matmos' response piece, "Rat Relocation". The duo keeps the field recording completely intact, and instead, with breakneck cut-ups and drills of noise, they attempt to heighten the degree to which the rat shatters the listener's peace. Tense swells and foreboding slurps are the initial enhancements, before the response of Schmidt's bass solo begins to viciously compete with the rat's squeals. The match-up is somewhat absurd, but the changing tides of this farcical battle seem to redeem what could have seemed a truly heartless response piece had it not existed at all.