chill field recordings of shipyards, factories, machines etc

anybody have any recommendations for calming field recordings of like… industrial environments?

I got really into this Staubitz and Waterhouse album this year, thanks to ilm poster Raymond Cummings: https://staubitzandwaterhouse.bandcamp.com/

Truck engines idling, mechanical white noise and stuff

And lately I’ve really fallen for “before dawn” off of this by Ludwig Berger: https://www.discogs.com/release/13051883-Ludwig-Berger-Cargo

Which i think is basically just a bunch of people unloading a shipping palette or something. Maybe there’s some weird voyeuristic thing here but I also think of when John cage would make recordings of the city and then listen to them repeatedly until they acquired musical qualities and he could predict when things happened or whatever. But I just find this stuff really soothing and conducive to mindfulness. Maybe appropriate for Moka’s “palette cleansing” revive on the “erasing your ipod” thread.

I know Maurizio Bianchi has done a lot of cool stuff that sounds like wrecking balls smashing together in the Grand Canyon…

Im not really knowledgeable on the rich history of this in noise/industrial/musique concrete. I’m looking for stuff that’s a little more like a sparse canvas and not a splatter of jackhammering.

didn’t thom yorke say something about fridge buzz long ago?

A little off topic in a way but you can get at least 1TB of field recordings from this guy's bandcamp page for around $30

https://freetousesounds.bandcamp.com/

Nice, looks very cool!!

https://ronjost.bandcamp.com/album/walking-around-a-cleveland-steel-mill

Adjacent to this is some of Chris Watson’s recordings in particular’El Tren Fantasma” and “Station Chapelle”.

Get thee to the works of Jean-Marc Vivenza, for starters. 'Aerobruitisme Dynamique' is one I've always found soothing - all recordings of airplane engines.
https://www.discogs.com/artist/83223-Vivenza

Francisco Lopez's 'Buildings: New York' is a great one, mostly ventilation systems.
https://www.discogs.com/release/82500-Francisco-L%C3%B3pez-Buildings-New-York

xp I adore El tren fantasma.

Love 'Memories of Steam'.

https://i.discogs.com/gWm0xXGAdkyuTJ7rOyFTNj4yJrBq9riU4ipBCBdlTwU/rs:fit/g:sm/q:90/h:600/w:600/czM6Ly9kaXNjb2dz/LWRhdGFiYXNlLWlt/YWdlcy9SLTIyOTEz/MDEtMTUzMjQ1OTc5/Mi01MDEzLmpwZWc.jpeg

Could listen to that for hours.

LPs of steam engine recordings are charity shop staples in the UK for some reason, were they issued to schools or something in the 1960s?

One particular steam train record I see in the states here is GHOST TRAIN which I buy each time I see it.
The Folkways LP "Sounds Of The Junk Yard" is a classic. They also did a bunch of cool animal recordings - frogs, whales etc.

Droll Yankees, a niche label-turned-birdhouse company, issued great recordings of steam boats, birds, the ocean & fog horns & boats etc. They are usually pretty cheaply available and very common in New England & the northeast US in general maybe.

there are recordings from the fifties & sixties of drag racing cars on motorways and stuff, but I''ve never seen the appeal of listening to traffic.

I really dig the droney choir of a freeway thats like 1-2 miles away… all those cars at once create a pretty magical nebulous warm din at the right distance. but yeah I hear what you mean, listening to cars peeling out close up doesn’t sound appealing to me

thanks for the recs, everyone

The Folkways LP "Sounds Of The Junk Yard" is a classic.

this is one of my favorite albums but i thought it was too un-chill for this thread!! it sounds like the sickest underground industrial-noise band ever

willing to check out less chill stuff I think, bring it on <3

I've been a fan of this album by Shuta Hiraki for a while--it's called Across the Empty Lot and according to the artist, is "Two mixer cars under construction on the bridge. I recorded the operating sound spreading in the open space from a distant place...It seems like amplified organ music." It's really quite good and you can hear the editing process through some overlapping records from different areas, but it's still clear that this is otherwise untreated sound.

https://falt.bandcamp.com/album/across-the-empty-lot

Not exactly what you requested, but asoftmurmur.com is a cool and customizable background noise generator that I use sometimes at work.

I'm also a big fan of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4p1mZnKkhc

damion romero - idle: the sound of a '68 plymouth road runner idling

https://www.discogs.com/release/678252-Damion-Romero-Idle

crüt and ian otm -- Sounds of the Junkyard is a must!! i remember getting it from emusic way back when and being fascinated by it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_Yvt1BsUwY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1FgHpozFsU

I know these aren’t super on point but might be of tangential interest

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1BtWEiHc0I

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8XJmJ-3XpE

Soothing recording of freeway hum:

https://on.soundcloud.com/wzfuXZb3F3p5vvjZ8

Field recording inside a salt mine:

https://abbildung.bandcamp.com/album/subterranean-salt-echoes-field-recordings

I've been a big fan of Peter Cuscak's field recordings ever since Baikal Ice was promo-ed in the Aquarius Records newsletter a couple decades back. His two volume Sounds From Dangerous Places is probably what brimstead is looking for - in particular volume 2 "Caspian Oil and UK Sites" which is exactly just that. However if you remove some context or shift perspective it's not far off from a David Lynch soundscape.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrPOwODlN3E

I love Baikal Ice - recorded around Lake Baikal in Siberia as the ice was breaking up and the sound of being out there at that time: the weird animals, the tough locals, the constant sound of ice breaking up, feels like being on some other planet somewhere.
https://petercusack2.bandcamp.com/album/baikal-ice

Cusack also posts on the internet archive and he's got hundreds of field recordings up there
https://archive.org/details/peter-cusack--baikal-ice-spring-2003

I was also thinking of Cusack and wondering if this would fit the bill

https://petercusack2.bandcamp.com/album/sounds-from-dangerous-places-vol-1-chernobyl

There is a pipe, or some vent, or something that makes a constant drone on greene avenue in brooklyn and i love it and today, just for you guys, i recorded it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DDV2wqzzJI

Woah, you need to offer day trips.

👍

Sort of a sidestep but this Ron Miles album, recorded at an abandoned railroad water-treatment facility in Colorado, is fucking magnificent: https://tanksounds.bandcamp.com/album/bardo-tank

wow great stuff, y’all thanks. <3 i have a lot of listening to do