Field Notes: East Bergholt Church, Ruined Tower 20th July 2025

I wasn’t early enough, by 10 minutes, as the bellringers started about 9:40, the intel from Dennis was slightly wrong. A lady walking through the graveyard shouted ‘Happy Recording!’ before I was actually recording, the headphones disconnected (wireless) after 5 minutes so I was unable to monitor the sound, the bells clipped a bit at the beginning of the recording as they were so loud even at about 30 feet away (they are usually way up in a tower projecting across town rather than at ground level), a good chat to the East Bergholt Ringers that were In favour of the recording and passed details of local     people to speak to, sounds from the town masked out the sounds of the aircraft which makes a pleasant change from the aircraft masking out the sounds of nature, organ and singing of hymns coming from inside the Church, they tyres of SUVs roaring past, a white unidentified flying feather hovering in the graveyard for 20 seconds before floating to the ground, a young man wearing a wind cheater in the rain.


The Pied Wagtail of Bergholt
the Pied Piper
​made me realise as I watched it twitching its tail from on top of a gravestone
that nature is a huge improvised ensemble
that could at any moment produce
a flourish
a drone
a rhythm
a fill
a chorus
a crescendo
a pause
and that beauty that exists in a moment
that only you witness
and then is gone
unseen by anyone else

go to it
and sit quietly until it comes to you
meet it half way

go to a concert of improvised music
to hear, see a recreation 
an imitation of the same process
in the best way that we know how.

all music is historical
unless it is being created right in the moment
be in the space where it is being made 
to get an unfiltered experience
natural sound is the same
listen to it without inhibition
raw, real and undiluted

the predetermined 
controlled
mapped out plan of conformity to life 
is as far away from this
as being locked in prison.