It has taken 5 years but it was well worth the wait. Gruenrekorder, a German label specialized on field recordings and soundscapes, has just released my new CD „Field Recordings from Barbados“ (please follow the link for more information and sound excerpts). Actually, these recordings had been lying around here for 4 years before I thought of publishing them.

 
When we went to Barbados in 2004, I took my DAT recorder with me, actually hoping for recording tropical jungle sounds. The island turned out to be somewhat different from what I had expected, but interesting nonetheless in many ways, and I managed to record some soundscapes that the folks from Gruenrekorder found worth listening to.

During our stay, we were glad that we had found Sea-U as our island base camp, a beautiful small hotel belonging to a very nice German woman, Uschi Wetzels. The hotel overlooks the small town Bathsheba that stretches along the wild coastline on the eastern part of the island – the ocean here is too wild to swim, even dangerous, so other than on the ‚platinum‘ west coast, there are not many tourists and the days and nights are quiet. Well relatively quiet – the evening concerts of millions of tree frogs were quite impressive (they can be heard on the CD of course).

We found Barbados incredibly diverse, there were so many things to do … such as … feeding colorful fish with bananas while snorkeling in the coral reefs, walking through a jungle gorge or a tropical botanical garden, visiting a sugar factory, taking a trip with a submarine … but one of my all-time favorite places of this planet remains the Sea-U garden above the Atlantic where I could often be found lying in the hammock, listening to a Jon Hassell record on my headphones.

 
Of course I took many more photos. Some of them are here