Mike Hoolboom: “How did you get interested in sound? In your wondrous blog you write about bicycle treks across Iceland, and how those places continue calling to you decades later. You’ve revisited many of these sites, as if your country was made out of memory itself, and most especially, the memory of sounds.”

Magnús Bergsson: “I became interested in sound in 1976. I was fascinated by stereos and started modifying them to improve their quality. This was accompanied by an interest in recordings because records sounded different at that time. I was also interested in recording nature but I couldn’t afford to buy a field recorder or a good microphone. It wasn’t until 1983 when I acquired a Sony TC-D5M recorder and ME20 & ME80 microphones that I was able to start recording in various locations.

“Between 1980-1990 I recorded concerts in Reykjavík. I also tried to record natural sounds, but outdoor recordings were limited by battery life, which barely lasted more than 30-60 minutes. If I used motorcycle batteries then I had a weight problem. It was not exactly manageable because in those years I traveled almost exclusively by bicycle. From 1986 I started traveling on a bicycle all over Iceland and around Europe. Probably because I always traveled alone and wasn’t chatting with fellow travelers, I spent even more time listening to the environment and nature around me.

“I acquired an ability to listen deeply to the environment. I was constantly aware of human-made sounds, especially engine noise and traffic, not only nearby, but also far away. Traffic noise acted like a pressure on the ear, the head, the mind. I wanted to be in places where I couldn’t hear traffic because it was the best way to relax.

“The silence in the highlands of Iceland is particularly memorable. These natural silences gave me an extremely deep connection with nature that will never be forgotten. In those years, before the turn of the century, few traveled through the highlands, and air traffic was much less frequent than it is today.

“I often wondered how I could capture this silence and bring it into the living room. I wasn’t sure it was possible. Even if I could have brought a recorder, silences would have been suffocated in noise the equipment itself generated.

“Between 1990 and 2000 I often recorded nature sounds that I both sold and gave away, recordings which I and others used to “relax” and enjoy. Around the turn of the century I tried using minidisc recorders, but they were no better than the Sony cassette recorder. It wasn’t until 2008 that I got my first digital HD field recorder. It was the first time I could record the silence in nature that I was searching for.”

Mike Hoolboom: “Humans appear more often in your earliest recordings, made in your home city of Reykjavík. There are malls crowded with Christmas shoppers, or carefully documented concerts in churches and theatres, though the most persistent recordings are at political rallies. Some demonstrations oppose the government’s austerity actions, while many are related to climate change and environmentalism. Do you see your recording project as a political act, a gesture of solidarity with the climate movement?”

Magnús Bergsson: “The drive to record human life probably comes from my father. I was born in Germany, where my father studied engineering and worked for ten years in the 1960s. In those years, phone calls between Germany and Iceland were extremely expensive. It was customary to write letters. Sometimes a tape recorder was used instead of writing so parents could hear their children’s voices and later grandchildren. Some of these tapes my father used still exist and are very dear to me because I can hear long-passed-away family members, for example grandparents, who responded by talking into the tape, sending news from Iceland to Germany.

“In this tape collection, which unfortunately is not large, I can hear various happenings in the home, such as guest arrivals and me singing and speaking in German, which unfortunately I can no longer speak. From this I learned that recording everyday life holds priceless resources. I have therefore recorded, without exception, every Christmas and New Year’s Eve, as well as various gatherings for fourteen years. Sometimes people know they are being recorded, sometimes they don’t. I think such recordings have a great value for the future. Not just for close relatives but also for history.

“Capturing the everyday in urban public spaces is an interesting pursuit, requiring a huge amount of work if I planned to do it in an orderly and purposeful way. I would have to get correct clothing, invisible equipment and mics which deliver perfect sound quality and aren’t disturbed by wind or touch. I have not had an easy time capturing such recordings. I need to think outside the box, as I managed to do with some Icelandic weather conditions. I might need to announce that a recording is in progress due to privacy laws. Anyway, recording soundscapes in public places is something I should do more of because they have historical significance, just like recordings of family life.

“Here I have to confess that I have a couple of masters who I have great respect for. There is Des Coulam whose sound blog Soundlandscape contains recordings from Paris, and Ian Rawes’s site London Sound Survey which features London recordings. Unfortunately Ian has passed away and I haven’t seen Des active for a few years. Both have great sound collections of big city life from the last decade.

“Speaking of the political messages in some of my recordings, I’m not sure they express my views. Protests are places where sudden changes can occur. It is always exciting to record protests because the result can be as effective as powerful music. When I got my first digital HD recorder during the financial crisis in 2008, many special events happened in downtown Reykjavík, and lasted for over a year. I recorded what I could during that time, but probably missed the most significant events because I was always at work when they were happening.

Mike Hoolboom: “In October 2009 you began a blog called Soundimage. Every month you post a new recording (though at the very beginning there were often more than one), along with a photograph of the location, a detailed description of the weather and occasion. You often name every bird, you comment on what kind of prevailing wind is present, the travel that made this recording possible, along with technical notes on the gear you use. Why did you begin this blog?”

Magnús Bergsson: “A friend of mine who was a program producer for the RÚV (Icelandic National Broadcasting Service) pointed me to the website quietamerican.org. I saw that it shouldn’t be a complicated matter to put sound on the web. It was probably in 2008 that I came across an audio blog that I absolutely fell for. Each entry contained a cool picture, a short lyrical text and a field recording. This was exactly what I wanted for my site. This blog was unfortunately not on the web for a long time and I don’t remember its name. It was taken down in 2010.

“I started my blog in October 2009. Around the same time I saw a number of similar field recording blogs or websites. During the first years it was a small community and everyone knew each other. We followed each other’s blogs and often interacted with advice and encouragement. For a long time these audio bloggers were only from the UK, France, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Russia, Australia and the USA. Some of these bloggers are still around but it seems to me that the ones I knew best haven’t done much in recent years and at least one has passed away. One stopped suddenly and unfortunately deleted all his content from the web and then disappeared.

“My blog was primarily designed for Icelanders and written in Icelandic. But because of a Russian blogger request, I started writing in English. I saw it as motivation to learn the language. Today I post exclusively in English, although it is still quite difficult for me. In 2011, Facebook started to expand and one of the results was more field recording groups. Several companies offered a large selection of small, cheap and decent recording devices, creating an explosion of interest in field recordings.

“Today there are many who maintain websites and blogs with recordings. There are so many it is impossible to follow them all. I have no doubt that there is a lot of good stuff to be found, but I simply don’t have the time. Web services regularly change their rules and owners, so I can never be sure if my project will last even one more year. I haven’t changed my blog since I started, except to enlarge the image size and increase the mp3 sound quality from 128mbps to 256mbps. Many offered to update the blog to a more modern style but I refused. I use themes from WordPress which they stopped supporting in 2012, so I’m starting to run into problems.”

Mike Hoolboom: “In many of your blog posts you write about the joys of quiet, how silence has become a kind of grail for you. How I thrilled to hear a soft wind touch a lava field, or the distant birds peeping in the northern highlands. Though in the latter you note that conditions are “Windy and wet which means I was not able to record the depth in the field that can often be heard through good recordings, recorded in calm, dry weather.”

“In the delicate but threatening half-hour wind recording you named “Gust Symphony” you write, “When it is calm and silent you can hear when the frost bites with a tiny ‘pop sound.’ Straws and branches rub together in the wind and ice breaks in the soil. Literally everything between falling snowflakes to strong winds blowing through tall trees in the distance… The natural acoustic in Iceland for 8 months a year is little more than silence or noise created by the wind.” Can you talk about why silence is important for you, and the special challenges of recording in these quiet places?”

Magnús Bergsson: “Cycling in the wilderness of the Icelandic highlands I was met by a deeply magnificent silence. Sometimes it felt I was in a Martian landscape as far as the eye can see. Maybe I could hear a brook or an occasional bird in the distance. The silence had such an effect on me. I now have good microphones and amplifiers to explore what’s in that silence, in places where I can hear nothing else but my “tinnitus light.”

“A low-noise, sensitive, large capsule microphone is like a telescope, or a zoom lens with a small aperture. It brings into focus all the subtleties in the local environment and what is happening at a great distance, even tens of kilometers away. It is fascinating to listen to what I cannot hear with my bare ears. However, the right weather conditions are necessary to achieve the depth I have sometimes heard through headphones. Maybe there are foxes calling in the distance. The dew-soaked grass under the microphone makes the sound of drops, the frost crackles. A bird flying low reacts when it accidentally sees a fur-dressed microphone. The wind, or even a light breeze, which is usually a problem, can also make the soundscape a pleasant symphony as long as small sounds can still be heard. It’s all about being in the right place at the right time which is pretty difficult. I solve this problem by recording continuously in the same place for 8-16 hours. This makes it more likely that I will find something interesting.

“There are events I cannot capture in a stereo recording, but sometimes witness in my expeditions. For example I have heard the sound of surf coming from the sky in a place where the coastline was 25 km away. I remember several such incidents under different circumstances. These natural phenomena are caused by the fact that sound travels differently and can be reflected at different temperatures. I would not have noticed this if there had been traffic noise.

“There are many things that make silence an exciting subject. One of the reasons is how hard it is to find. It’s not just about the weather conditions. When I talk about silence, there must be no engine noise, car or air traffic, surf at the beach, or sounds of a waterfall or river. All these natural and unnatural sound sources are in their own way forms of pink, brown or gray noise which are easy to record but not fun to listen to. There are not many places left where there is sustained silence. Their number has shrunk due to the increase in car and air traffic, tourism, the greater speed and activity of people 24 hours a day.

“It’s been a relatively short time since I discovered how difficult and interesting it can be to record “silence” in the sea and lakes. But these underwater soundscapes call for me to record there. In order to be successful, the weather must be calm with no ship or boat traffic, and there are other “technical problems” which I am trying to solve.”

Mike Hoolboom: “For all the gear heads out there, I wonder if you could speak about the equipment you use. Your blog notes are meticulously detailed on this matter, so for those who need to know everything, they can source the whole story there. But you’ve gone through different configurations of recorders and microphones, and even tinkered with the gear yourself, and had a hydrophone (for underwater recordings) made specially for you. Could you describe the set up you work with most often, and why it suits you?”

Magnús Bergsson: “I’m probably old school when it comes to these matters. I try always to work so that I don’t need to do anything in post-production. I don’t want to sit in front of a computer and try to fix bad recordings.

“Unfortunately, sound recording is not my main job. That’s why I try to use the time well when I go on recording trips. I always try to record for a long time, preferably many hours. I take advantage of the nights and mornings when traffic is limited and weather conditions for recording are usually nice. In addition, I often have two devices running at the same time, which today are MixPre6. The MixPre6’s best feature is the high quality preamps. It is incredibly energy efficient and compact. Last fall I also got a Zoom F3, which makes it possible to have a third device running.

“I am extremely picky about microphones, which is a bit of a problem because I always have a large number with me for field recordings. The microphones I mainly use are both old and new Sennheiser MKH series. Ultra-low noise Rode NT1, NT1a and Lewitt LCT540s. As well I always have with me very light, DIY-baffled stereo microphones based on 2×2 Primo EM172 capsules. The EM172 microphone is very good on a boom especially when the wind is strong. Without using HPF, it can withstand incredibly high wind before wind becomes a problem in recordings. Those microphones, as well as the Sennheiser MKH series, can be used in literally any situation and weather conditions where ambient sounds are clearly audible.

“I have placed most of these microphones in fixed stereo arrangements inside Rycote windscreens for different projects using traditional MS (MKH30/40), but also a four-channel baffled AB setup with parallel MKH8020-8040 microphones. This setup has given me a variety of options in post-production as it is possible to combine and separate the advantages of omni and cardioid microphones in one set. It works like an adjustable, multi-pattern stereo microphone.

“Both the Rode and Lewitt microphones are large diaphragm, studio condenser microphones. Highly sensitive for small details and ultra-low noise. Once in the windscreens, they take up a lot of space and are unwieldy, but absolutely essential whenever absolute silence can be expected.

“I have four Lewitt LCT540s that I set up in an IRT arrangement. This offers various possibilities in post-processing. They are configured so that each pair forms a 90°/30cm angle (NOS) into four directions. It can give me up to 12 different stereo mixes plus a 5.1 surround mix.

“I had Benthowave in Canada build me a hydrophone which has both low noise and a wide flat frequency range from 0.4Hz to 60Khz. They are very nice and natural sounding, but I made the mistake of not asking for the built-in 10Hz HPF (high-pass filter). I have been struggling with various low frequency problems for two years, but it seems I’ve mostly solved it “mechanically.” These hydrophones are the key to being able to get good recordings of crawling glaciers, which has been one of my main recording projects in recent years.

“I have been using LOM geophones, AKG contact mics and Aquarian H2A hydrophones as contact mics for various recording projects.

“I haven’t done much recording of individual bird or animal species. But when I’ve done that, I’ve used a Wildtronics parabola with an Audio Technica BP4025 stereo microphone. It’s not necessarily the best choice of microphone if I am thinking only of capturing individual sounds, but it still produces remarkably clear and low-noise stereo recordings.

“For several years I have been trying to record solar storms (some say Auroras) with a VLF receiver. I record natural electromagnetic bursts in the frequency range of 20-20Khz. But I’m never happy with the results. In all these years, I can’t say that I managed to record anything interesting. Mostly I’m never in the right place at the right time. But the main problem is EMF (Electric and Magnetic Fields) pollution from power lines and electric fences. Also, I’m dealing with a lot of pink noise, and I’m not sure if that’s natural, human-made or both. VLF (Very Low Frequency) recordings require a lot of knowledge about antennas and the behavior of space weather, but I haven’t had the time to study it. I use two home-made loop antennas that I set up in an XY axis on a tripod to achieve stereo recording from two directions. These recordings have always been extremely contaminated by 50hz noise from the electric grid and harmonic frequencies over the entire frequency range, even though I have been far away from human structures and high voltage lines. So when I want to edit these recordings, it takes a lot of time, and this process affects the sound quality of the recording. The Solar Cycle progression is now increasing after low activity in 2020, so I have 4-6 years to record something interesting.

“I have been quite lucky to be able to record regular concerts of a symphony orchestra for more than 10 years. Recently I have been using a 12-channel Sonosax recorder and my favorite microphones, which are the Russian-made Nevaton MC59C and MC59O. They are similar to the MKH8040 and 8020, except that the MC59s have less self-noise and a much warmer, more natural sound than the MKHs. If I had the chance to get more of them I would, and even sell the MKH80 mics. But due to the embargo imposed by the West on Russia, it is unlikely that I will be able to get more of these outstanding microphones.”

Mike Hoolboom: “You’ve made little attempt to monetize your work or even call attention to your efforts. Why?”

Magnús Bergsson: “I’m a really bad salesman. I am extremely judgmental towards myself and believe that many others who work in field recording do much better. I have little interest in competing with them. I’m also aware that audio work provides fluctuating income so I’m not much for taking financial risks by changing work. The main reason is probably that I have a full-time job as an electrician at a workplace that has always paid me a salary for 40 years and has never fired me, no matter what.

“My interest in sound recording is not strictly limited to waving a microphone and making money. I am most interested in documenting sounds that I believe will change in the coming years due to human activity and climate change. The scientific community has not begun to think about this in Iceland and is generally closed to amateurs. Finance for nature research is very limited.

“I have applied for grants and received one which gave me the opportunity to spend a summer recording soundscapes in Iceland’s national parks. But in general, there is no interest in supporting field recordings as research. I have worked on several projects, but few were attached to income. It has been mainly recording musicians or making ambiences for films.

“As a debt-free person, I have often thought about working less as an electrician, so I can record what I must before it is too late. I especially have in mind glaciers, glacier lagoons and places that are changing due to rapid changes in vegetation and biodiversity. I have to find my own way to record these places which is both time consuming and requires resourcefulness. I am retiring in five years so I may have to consider audio recordings as an opportunity for future income .”