Michael Pisaro’s Nature Denatured and Found Again is a massive work that was the result of recordings taken and edited between 2011 and 2018. The album spans four hours and, like Continuum Unbound before it, attempts to illuminate the richness of any minute sound event. With Continuum Unbound, Pisaro aimed to sever the seeming continuities of sound that our brains are wont to create. Nature has similar aspirations, but does so with the express purpose of seeking field recording as a tool for magnifying the effects of climate change. In the liner notes, Pisaro asks two questions that effectively guided the album: “Can environmental changes be made audible? Are such changes something we sense at the very edge of perception?”

Nature has its roots in Flussaufwärtstreiben, a soundwalk installation created by Joachim Eckl, Marcus Kaiser, and Michael Pisaro. It involved moving between six defined locations along the Grosse Mühl river that had listening stations with different performers. This would occur five days in a row with different guidelines for each day’s listening sessions, and the entire process was to be repeated for a total of five years. In the end, years three and five involved different parameters, and the fourth year was skipped altogether. In addition to capturing the phenomena of climate change, Pisaro uses Nature as a way to recreate the experience of participating in the installation.

Nature dedicates each of its five discs to a different year. The first three discs contain recordings from Flussaufwärtstreiben, disc four is comprised solely of sine tones and noise to represent this “silent” year, and disc five combines material from two sources: a concert from 2012 held after the year’s corresponding soundwalk, one that mixed field recording with live performance; and field recordings that took place in 2015, the fifth year of the installation. Every disc contains four tracks, and each track is 12 minutes and 12 seconds long. The final 12 seconds of every track are solely comprised of silence.

Each disc on Nature finds Pisaro approaching his material from different angles. The title hints at the ultimate goal: to break down sounds as a way to train listeners’ ears before recreating a new world that will expose how the environment has changed. On the first disc, Fissures in Green (2011), Pisaro takes field recordings and edits them with splices and cuts that encourage a discrete hearing of sounds. The beauty of birdsong, wind, and water are made apparent in their raw presentation, but it’s these edits that force a reexamination, a closer inspection, a deeper appreciation. On “Silent Prayer,” we hear how the gentle playing of a flute—performed by composer Antoine Beuger—gently colors its surrounding environment, itself an equal contributor to the sound world as any living organism.

Pathsplitter (Yellow-Red) (2012), the album’s second disc, finds Pisaro layering multiple recordings on top of each other as a way of layering time itself. The result, as expected, is a series of drones. What impresses most about this disc is how these layers impress upon the listener a great sense of a sound’s density—both in the changing dynamics of each piece, but also in the interactions between soft instrumentation (be it from sine tones or a clarinet) and the thick fog amassed from the field recordings.

Disc three, Landscape in Black and Grey (2013), builds its premise on the overwhelming depth in sound of the Grosse Mühl river. Pisaro observes the full audio spectrum of any recording to be a “chord,” and on two tracks, utilizes bandpass filtering to separate out individual “notes.” This methodology pinpoints how the river’s constituent parts are rich themselves, but also vital in contributing to its overall sound.

White Light Under the Door (2014) is the album’s fourth disc and, in representing a year in which the soundwalk didn’t take place, features nothing but sine tones and filtered noise. Since these sounds are highly variable given the acoustics of any space they’re played inside, these four tracks are valuable for reminding the listener of how important any given locale is to the music that’s heard; whereas previous discs pointed to the immensity of any individual sound, this one upholds the space as an equally important sonic factor. Even more, the four tracks here are among the most meditative on Nature, serving to calm the listener as a way to help them be more astute to subtle changes in sound.

Nature finally culminates with Hellgrün (Small New World) (2015), and it’s when the melding of human instrumentation and field recording is at its most compelling. The instrumentation is often romantic, and the birdsongs on the first two tracks are equally as sensuous. While any aspirations to help listeners discern climate change’s effects aren’t exactly fulfilled, it would be erroneous to see Nature as any sort of failure. Like the soundwalk itself, Nature is all about patient and repeated listens of a particular environment. Pisaro’s editing helped to magnify and separate out different components of the Grosse Mühl river. In the procedural structuring of the album is a tender desire to be more aware of our surroundings. As a result, Nature primes listeners for listening of their own, one that occurs in their own environments. Whether we’ll be able to notice any incremental changes in sound is less important than how it inspires a desire to be more aware of environmental concerns. If close listening is a praxis for dismantling our hierarchies of sound, then Nature posits that this restructuring result in actionable change.