“Listen to this,” he said as he started the tape machine.
 
We stood, facing the monitors that were on a shelf above the mixing board—a window view of the darkened live room beyond. He adjusted the levels quickly and stepped back.
 
What sounded like a wind-chime filled the room—a wind-chime on a farmhouse porch—restless in a shifting tempest. I could feel a change in barometric pressure, and a subtle increase in humidity as the sound floated on the breeze. The feeling was vast and lonely as though isolated on an American prairie. There was tension and foreboding. There was barely any sound, yet all my senses were heightened. I imagined that there were no people around—something unknown and powerful was out there in the surrounding fields.
 
I was transported, and looked to the sky, anticipating that first stinging drop of open country rain upon my brow. My spine went cold as the chime went silent for a moment and resumed with a more vigorous meter.
 
“This, is my breakthrough recording,” he said, snapping me back into the room.
 
I described what I had heard—or imagined that I heard, and he was delighted with my description.
 
‘Rain,” he said, “was in the forecast. The barometer was indeed falling, and what you are hearing, or sensing , is the leaves turning upward in response to humidity. This is a recording of a single plant that I brought into the studio. I set up an array of all types of microphones and listening devices. And,” he continued, “I almost didn’t roll the tape because  of the distant thunder.”
 
He was clearly in his own head as he drew down the sliders and stopped the tape machine.
 
“Not everyone can hear it,” he said over his shoulder as he rummaged through a cabinet and pulled out a handful of cables.
 
“Come on, I want to show you what’s happening in the greenhouse.”
 
We made our way out of the barn that housed the studio. The low lighting and the feeling of rain on the recording set me up for a few moments of adjustment as we stepped out into the sunshine. The sun hit me like a white-hot skillet. I went to the ground in a heap.
 
“This whole place is vibrating man, this whole place is vibrating.” Ronnie was running around waving her arms in delight.
 
Ronnie’s band had just finished up a thirty-two date tour prior to booking the farm. They were still wound up from the road. They acted like caged animals. The studio couldn’t hold them.
 
They arrived with an album’s worth of material to finish and lay down on tape—songs written on tour—songs about hotel rooms, and long-distance romance, about longing, and aircraft grade aluminum. After a week in the country, they threw all those songs away.
 
“This whole place is vibrating man.”
 
The band would scatter into the woods in the morning and explore the stonewalls, fields, and barns. They would return to the studio in the evening to write and share the sounds that the day had given them. A collection of natural materials was accumulating in the studio—pinecones and nuts, feathers and bones. A few hollow logs were added to the drum kit. Some antique bells were hanging on a mike-stand. The sound of a woodpecker made it into a drum fill, a few phrases of birdsong could be heard in the keyboard parts.
 
When the songs were ready, they recorded overnight, during the full moon, in a derelict barn down the road. We moved all the equipment out there and threw the doors open wide to the sounds of insects and peepers. We brought the band’s collection of found objects to the sessions as well—baskets of pinecones, and arrangements of feathers, various nuts, crooked branches, and bird’s nests.
 
“Oh shit, are you all right?” He was standing over me, shielding me from the sun.
 
“How long was I out?’
 
“Ha! Barely a minute,” he said
 
“Do you remember when Ronnie’s band came up here?” I asked, still lying on the ground.
 
“Of course,” he said, as he helped me to my feet. “That’s what this is all about. That’s why I called you back up here. Found Objects is the best record we ever made. Possibly THE best record ever made. It’s magical, the fields and forests singing along. You set up that barn perfectly for the sessions. You never said much, but you never let us delude ourselves into thinking that we were doing something great when we weren’t.”
 
I put my sunglasses on and brushed some earth from my sleeve. He was on the verge.
 
“Perfect,” he said, “bands always looked to you when they were recording. If you were bopping your head to the music, they would worry—but if they looked over and you were unconscious, they knew they were onto something.”
 
That overnight recording session in the barn was as transcendent as it gets. The band played the songs live, in order—two or three takes of each song. We didn’t even play back except to check the tape. The result was an arc of the ambient sounds of the night. When Ronnie closed the record with her acoustic number, Dawn Breaking Everywhere, the birds were singing along, and the band was weeping, as the sun crept across the chestnut floorboards.
 
We recorded the sounds of frying bacon when Sara cooked breakfast for us up at the house —the perfect bookends for the album. The bacon sizzling sounded like the pops and scratches of a vinyl pressing. We doubled the vocals and did a little cleanup, but not much. Even the sound of a crate of pinecones vibrating off the bass cabinet made the final cut.
 
“In fact,” he said, interrupting my reminiscence, “I think there are some sounds of you snoring on that record. Come on, you have to see this.”
 
The greenhouse was quite an operation. Steel and glass buildings had replaced the Quonset hut where Sara had grown peppers, tomatoes, and herbs for the kitchen, and he had grown some weed for the studio. Now it was commercial in scale. There were benches filled with pots on a rail system. The long narrow building we went into had a huge arching bandshell at the far end of the rails. I know he built it too. It was beautifully constructed using strips of cherry harvested and sawn on the property—finished like furniture. 
 
In the bandshell was a tiered stage with plants in various sized clay pots, arranged much as an orchestra might be—each variety of plant grouped together by leaf size or flower. There were some small trees in the back.
 
The bandshell was set up for recording. Where I expected to find microphones, there were ears of flint corn—stripped of their protective leaves and skewered vertically on stiff copper wire. Eagle feathers were mounted on small wooden cups. Wires led back to a seismograph type of device combined with a phonograph cylinder—a needle cutting into wax rotated by a silent electric motor. There were woodpecker feathers strung all around.
 
“Frequencies,” he said as he wired up a giant pinecone. “A lot of this stuff is from those sessions we did—it’s like they’re tinned for soldering, ready to receive, already trained."
 
He looked around and checked a couple of connections, repositioned a bird’s nest and gave some words of encouragement to a hydrangea.
 
“I started working out here between gigs and listening to music. I built a great PA system out here for myself. The seedlings seemed to like it. Everything appeared to grow faster and heartier. Found Objects was in the cue, and it elicited some type of excitement among the plants. I played it on a loop, and it was like dusk and dawn occurring every forty-two minutes. I think,” he said and pausing, “they are learning the songs.”
 
There was an air-conditioned shed about fifty feet downstage of the bandshell that housed the recording equipment. It was also on rails and had flexible hoses and strain relief for the cables. Inside, along with the recording console and tape machines were an array of custom-built filtering and processing devices. There were studio monitors and seventeen small speakers that appeared to be constructed of thinly sliced vegetables.
 
“Roll the tape, it’s all cued up,” he shouted, his voice booming in the booth, “and there’s a video camera outside next to the control room. Press record. It’s all set to go. Yeah, that’s it, on the side there.”
 
Through the window in the booth, I watched as a large vine unfurled and wrapped around his shoulder like a teenage boy yawning and putting an arm around his date at the movies.
 
Another vine snaked its way over to him and gave him a pat on the back before withdrawing into the shadows.
 
“I didn’t even plant these things,” he said, “I steamed all the soil, but rodents and birds get in. Nature will find a way. Everything is accelerating in here. It’s fantastic—they give the orchestra some mobility.”
 
The vines moved quickly and silently like serpents.
 
“This is the first run with all the new capturing devices. I’ve recorded a standard track using conventional techniques and microphones —but all I have gotten so far is a recording of me padding around and the sound of my hands contacting the leaves. Ha!”
 
“Still rolling,” I said.
 
He sprang into action like Sir Simon Rattle busting loose from his podium and touching every instrument himself. It was comical seeing him move about the stage—his arms waving like a madman attempting to capture the attention of an innocent on the street. He ran back and forth, up and down—touching each section, conducting with contact. And there was sound and energy coming from the organic ensemble in the bandshell. It wasn’t a song in the Western sense maybe, but it was melodic, and the needles were jumping. He stepped down from the stage.
 
“Keep rolling,” he shouted, “I feel that we can shift the frequencies a bit. You know the way NASA shifts the color of deep space photography—shifting light to the visible spectrum for human consumption, I think that we can do that here.”
 
I was beginning to think that might not be necessary. The capturing devices he had built were working wonders.
 
“Still rolling,” I said
 
“Vegetable Dreams take two,” he said with a laugh.
 
The vines, which now seemed to be multiplying before my eyes, took to the stage. A large vine slithered its way into the control room with me. It was exuding hot vegetable respiration—overwhelming, as though I had stuck my face into an industrial pot of boiling asparagus soup. The door was now open to the hot house—the air conditioning couldn’t keep up. 
 
The vine draped over my shoulder and studied my every move. I tweaked knobs and sliders labeled as corn, pinecones, and feathers—familiarizing myself with the resulting effects as the vines danced about the stage conducting the plant orchestra. They moved smoothly and effortlessly—more efficiently than my man running around the bandshell. They were indeed learning the songs. I could see and hear his vision coming together.
 
The plants were adding flourishes and techniques that he hadn’t shown them. Their understanding and participation increasing exponentially. The serpent/vine behind me, reached over and adjusted a slider labeled ‘bird’s nest’, with a sticky tendril. Totally right.
 
That piece came to a close, and the vines withdrew from the stage. The greenhouse was crackling with energy and excitement. What is next?
 
“Vegetable Dreams take three,” he said.
 
Now he did something I hadn’t expected. He picked up pruning shears, jumped back onto the stage, and proceeded to clip away at leaves and stems in a time signature known only to him. I could feel a change in the room—the type of cool feeling one gets as you step into a sacred site or ancient burial ground. A cloud covered the sun.
 
A vine twisted its way up a leg of the tripod and switched off the camera with a finger-like stab of the correct button. Another vine made it over to the tape machine to stop the recording, but not before the sounds of a horrible pruning of human limbs was committed to tape.
 
I awoke in darkness with the bloodied tools in my hands. A refrain on a loop, “This whole place is vibrating man, this whole place is vibrating.” A wind-chime on a farmhouse porch.
 
Birdsong summoning the dawn.
 
 
© Jon Montgomery 2025.