04/2025

Welcome to the 12th installment of our monthly playlist! Can you believe it’s been a full year since we embarked on this musical journey together? Our research team at Shufu Studio is thrilled to present this month’s collection—a truly unique assemblage of rare recordings and sound art from around the globe.

This month, we delved into works that function more as statues of sound rather than traditional music pieces. We believe we’ve truly outdone ourselves with the depth of our research. The findings speak for themselves: out of the 16 tracks in this playlist, only 6 can be found across all major streaming services. For the ultimate experience, you’ll need to listen to most of this playlist on our website—sorry, not sorry!

Spanning countries like Brazil, Uganda, Finland, France, the Netherlands, Japan, the USSR, and more (!!!), this month’s mixtape showcases a global passion for the exploration of sound and its possibilities. Inside this playlist, you’ll find a variety of works—some are sound collages, others are pure noise experiments, and a few transport us to a parallel world where drones reign supreme, completely detached from the pace of modern life. Among these, there are field recordings that contain such intriguing sonic artifacts that our ears intuitively recognize patterns, perceiving them as “natural” musical compositions.

We’d like to shine a light on two standout tracks from this collection:

“A La Tardecer Con Las Oropendolas” by self-taught French musician Frédéric Nogray. This captivating piece is crafted from field recordings Nogray made in Honduras back in 2012. It creates an otherworldly soundscape filled with impulsive and chaotic bird calls. Listening to the full album, you’d notice that Nogray has collaborated with another legendary artist who we plan to feature in an upcoming playlist, so stay tuned for that!

The second highlight is another field recording made over 50 years prior – “Глухарь” (Tetrao urogallus) by Boris Veprintsev. This remarkable track captures the haunting percussive beak clicks and frenzied squeals of the western capercaillie. Veprintsev, a Russian biophysicist and ornithologist, is known for one of the largest early collections of bird sounds. His monumental work, “Birds of the USSR,” spans multiple LPs and covers over 150 bird species. While we highly recommend listening to his entire collection, this particular track is truly enchanting. So much so, in fact, that we find it used as a sample in many recordings, old and new alike. Here are a couple of examples we found:
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=XUNNRWHrc1U
https://open.spotify.com/track/7s5tNceVlim1UVvMJZzvZ9

As we celebrate this milestone, we’re excited about the many more months and years of research into the history of recorded music that lie ahead. Our team is ever expanding, so if you believe you have something to contribute to our research efforts, please feel free to reach out at research@shufu.studio.

Thank you for joining us on this sonic adventure, and we hope you enjoy this month’s playlist!