Absent Near Dawn is part of The Absent Listener series of soundscapes pieces, which are all derived from continuous soundscape recordings recorded at my home. I live on a 14-acre property that has mixed forests with a mixture of rocky and swampy terrain and that borders on a lake. It is also 20 KM from the closest highway.

This location has influenced my compositions since moving there in 2014. I have stripped away virtually all electronic manipulations of recorded sounds which were once common in my work. I have also adapted my recording process. Now I intentionally avoid being present for the recordings which I collect on a daily basis. This way the natural rhythms and nuances of my environment unfold without my presence – as the recordist – influencing them.

The recordings are made continuously and unsupervised save for battery changes and maintenance visits every two days. Recordings are made with two DPA 4060 lavalier omni-directional microphones mounted in a boundary configuration that are occasionally augmented with an Aquarian Audio hydrophone and LOM geophone.

Absent Near Dawn is based on recordings that happened within one hour before or after daybreak. They are arranged in a chronological sequence of recordings that happened approximately every 4 to 6 weeks between December 2021 and June 2022. All of the recordings retain their original character, pitch, speed and spatial imaging. Multiple recordings are overlapped throughout the piece. The piece was premiered for multichannel concert presentation in April 2023 at the Ear Sound Scape series in Copenhagen, Denmark and Malmö, Sweden.