The Hunt For Leaf Pickup

This post is a continuation of the last post, The Hunt For Garden Table, so if you haven’t checked that one out, you might want to start there.

During the month of November, I continued to mess around with the Lom Geofón, but instead of conjuring the sounds of Marko Ramius’ broken escape vehicle with a dishwasher and garden table, I moved on to what I might hear passing through my closed windows.¹

If you asked Jacques Prévert² about leaves, I bet he would tell you that most of them fall in autumn. I bet he also didn’t have a truck that drove around his neighborhood that vacuumed up all the leaves and mulched them for him though. Thankfully, I do! Every October and November, in my little hamlet, a truck plods its way through the streets making a hell of a ruckus sucking up leaves that have been pushed to the curb.³ It turns out that windows make a good resonant chamber for the Geofón to capture. I dig the slow approach of the leaf mulching vacuum truck or whatever it might be called:

Around the same time, my neighbors directly across the street decided to get their driveway repaved, and that also presented a bit of an opportunity. The crew showed up with a miniature steamroller, and I managed to get the Geofón on the window in time to capture the following:

I love that little bit at the end when the steamroller rattles onto the street. It totally sounds like a broken caterpillar drive in the making.⁴

Recording Geek Note: Rig consists of Lom Geofón. It was tracked with a Cooper CS 104 feeding a Sound Devices 744T