unfields01 is brought to you by fidget (erin anderson), an experimental electronic musician, a philadelphia dj, one-half of flowchart alongside sean o'neal, and most importantly a found sounds/field recordings junkie. her gathering of field recordings took place in foundsound's hometown of philadelphia. read below and take in what she has to say about it. note the track "beastification" from fusiphorm's unfound05 ep was constructed entirely with sounds extracted from unfields01.

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unfields01 - fidget - raw philly sounds

on this particular day, which was a friday, late afternoon, during rush-hour, the sounds were swarming--which was just what i was looking for because i was collecting sounds for a project that centered around urban noise. so i figured to go to ground zero, which in philadelphia means city hall. it's where the two main streets in town (broad and market) intersect inside this ridiculously ornate tower-like structure with a gigantic clock and a statue of william penn (the founder of pennsylvania?) perching at the top. i've heard it described as "a crazy-haunted pirate ship"--which fits the bill quite well, i think. surrounding the building is a concrete park that descends two stories down into a suburban station where you can catch the regional railroad trains and subways. as you go from the outside to the underground, you have to walk through tile-lined, tunnel-like places which are ideal spots for street musicians to perform because the reverberation is so great. on this outing, i caught a white kid with dreads playing a bongo alongside a middle-aged black man strumming the electric guitar while sounding just like (if not better) than al green. i fell in love!!

what impressed me so much about this experience was how therapeutic it was for me mentally and emotionally. in this complicated, distraction-laden world we live in where everybody is multitasking in every moment of consciousness--with their cellphones and blackberries--it's all too easy to get sucked into the pace of it. and yes, definitely, i was becoming sucked in at the time. but when i went out to record, that feeling went away out of necessity because i had to be 110% aware of the sound levels while recordings onto my minidisk. i was totally focused on my surroundings (and not distracted by the chatter on my cellphone or the chatter in my head), and this whole new beautiful world just opened up around me while i was in a place where i have been dozens of times before. recording the sounds around me opened my eyes. the inspiration i was looking for was right before me the entire time, and all i had to do was listen.

-fidget