Pond

New York-based sound artist John Hudak excels at manipulating recordings from nature and other sources into microscopic architectures. Such sources have included his speaking voice (Room with Sky), an answering machine message left by his mother before she died (Don’t Worry About Anything, I’ll Talk To You Tomorrow), and even falling snow (Pieces of Winter, in collaboration with Stephan Mathieu). For this 1998 release on the Meme label, he layered a chorus of underwater insects into a soothing mille-feuille that always seems to change. That such lushness can be achieved without a shred of pretentiousness makes it worth holding dear.