Now on the CD, the 66 tracks have time-labels spanning 24 hours. Did you hang out behind that tree for 24 hours (i.e. are these the actual times of your recordings?), or are these fictive times structuring the narrative of a soldier’s duty?

And, while we’re on the specifics (before we get going on the “nothingness of how we experience ambient sound”!), can you say what recording equipment you used and what software you edited/processed it with?

short answer:
a bit of both.

long answer:
I tried to go into the Buffer Zone at roughly the point were my mother’s village once used to be (it’s now totally razed). I had no idea what kind of sounds I would record there or even what I would do with them. I suppose the first thing on my mind was a curiousity about what kind of feel the buffer zone would have.
Walking around with a microphone made me very nervous if I would encounter a soldier or not.
I was stopped in a few places by UN soldiers (hiding my mike) and had to turn back, but I finally found a place overlooking a dry-river bed that had a beautifully wide acoustic space, where I was hidden by a tree. I suppose I was intersted in capturing the feeling of the space without knowing what sonic content I would find.
The strange thing about doing these kind of field recordings is that you are constantly asking yourself: “How long more shall I continue recording ? Am I getting interesting material ? Is there a better spot ? Is the mike pointing in the optimum direction ?”
I ended up recording a landscape of birds, insects, occasional airplanes, trucks in the distance, wind on the mike (which at first one tries to avoid, but then later realised that it had such a dramatic effect in disturbing the sonic quietitude on the recording that I kept all the clips and distortions it produced). Other inardvertent sounds I captured where my own footsteps (recording my own inability to sit still for long periods of time !), which I also kept in the piece, because it somehow represented that impatience of the soldier, and gave the recording a clear subjective stamp, which in the piece you project into the steps of the soldier , the sole character in the piece.
The problem in field recordings I always find is how to capture the ‘nothingness’ of how we experience ambient sound. Because I don;t necessarily think that the foreground of sounds that happen in a recording are necessarily what is interesting about them. It’s seems to be a question of duration and context.
Capturing that sense of time – the slow circadian cycles that affect an enviroment’s sound. How does one translate that into the format of a musical structure.
The day I spent in the Buffer Zone, I did discover a lot of things about the piece I wanted to compose. Simply because I had to sit next to the microphone, which I had just placed in the long grass, and just wait and listen for long periods of time. My piece had to do with a soldier on guard duty in the buffer zone, and just simply experiencing that act of waiting there, I could potentialy have an insight into the world that the UN soldier experiences, while sitting on his watch tower.
In the end I used parts of this recording in the piece, as long sections in the beginning, middle and end without treatment. Keepin it more or less intact as I recorded it. All the other more isolated use of bird and insect material were actually from samples, simply because I wanted a clean recording which I can digitally manipulate. So in that aspect I cheated !