Love In The Pond, by Paulo Raposo

Love In The Pond

by Paulo Raposo

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about

LOVE IN THE POND is a field-recording work exclusively made with frogs using hydrophones in the southwest mountains of Monchique, Portugal.

On the first hot day in February on the Monchique mountain, while shooting a documentary, one could hear from the road a growing familiar noise echoing through the steep thick slopes of the
landscape where the arbutus ripen.

We went down through a semi-abandoned forest path, between the (evil) eucalyptus and occasional arbutus until ahead we found a pond 20 meters long and 4 wide, resonating with a myriad of frog calls, some loud and aggressive, others deep, purring croaks only
discernible with the hydrophones.

Ponds are perfect amphibian breeding habitats and most are dried-up andsilent around these parts of Portugal, but these frogs had just woken up in this early spring to mate, and they fight to mate through intimidating sounds. Amongst years of recording ponds and amphibians, i had never found such a profusion of inter-related individual calls, only the smooth common chorus.

While taking the gear out and setting the hydrophones apart from each other, our presence was detected in the neighborhood. Abrupt silence. As everything was set up, we lay down very silently in a huge rock above and with the headphones on we began to hear scratching sounds from the pond floor and progressively sparse croaks returning.

After 10 or 15 minutes during the recording, we decided simply to leave the warm stones and let it record for an hour or so. After wandering around among the arbutus we went down again to the pond and changed the hydrophone positions every half hour,
closer to the center of the pond or positioned from the edges.
The present tracks comprise a selection of these two-hour field
recordings.

As mentioned before, they are presented as is, with only slight
equalization and panning. As the pond is not deep at all, maybe
less than one meter, there are noticeable sounds from cars on the
road, also some birds and crickets.

In the marvelous image of nature photographer, Albano Soares, we see how male frogs grasp the females in an embrace known as amplexus. In the sound recording itself, we suspect ardent males are often clasping each other, deterred by protesting croaks.

A year later, returning to the same place, what we found was only a disturbing silence, muddy and contaminated water. The pond was

credits

released May 30, 2020

Dedicated to Yannick Dauby!

Recording and mixing: Paulo Raposo
Photography by Albano Soares (sapo-corredor / Bufo Calamita)
Font Art by Miguel Carvalhais
Recording assistance: Silvia Coelho
Thanks to Steve Peters

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sirr-ecords Portugal

founded january 2001

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