(soundscapes of east vancouver at c. 5am)

I can’t sleep tonight. 

What about you? 

I love nighttime soundscapes. 

They’re so bareboned, minimal, like the rumble that you hear now, mostly from Vancouver harbour, but also the industrial area here in east vancouver.

So I'm up, recording, listening, figuring out what keeps me up at night, this night, other nights, when I listen and try to understand... 

Sometimes I feel like I can hear inaudible sounds, like the polar ice caps melting…

(homeless person walking by with wagon)

But of course what I'm hearing here is the life around me. A homeless person just walked by with their wagon of survival materials and that's what happens at night. Life unfolds and people try to survive. 

Some are dormant and some are very active, like the raccoons who are doing their work. 

But back to the ice melting, that's what I find bewildering is this state between awakeness and sleep. A kind of dream state where I'm not sure what exactly I'm hearing and my imagination kind of takes over, so, I do sometimes feel like I'm listening to things like the ice melting up north in the arctic or feeling the trees around me growing. 

What is the sound of a tree growing? What are those kinds of things. 

They don't always wake me, but they sometimes keep me up at night in wonder and I worry about this fragile world…

Wednesday, May 3rd, 2023, 5.12am. 

What keeps you up at night?

*

The soundscape for this episode was recorded at 5.07 am in Vancouver on May 3, 2023.

I am grateful and accountable to the earth and the human labour that provided me with the privilege of producing this episode. (including all the toxic materials and extractive processes behind the computers, recorders, transportation and infrastructure that make this podcast possible).

My gesture of reciprocity for this episode is to the The Only Animal  theatre company.