Starlings' startling murmuration on the moor

Cities and Memory - remixing the world

"Moors have always been mysterious places to me. Maybe it is because of its role in Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles, or because of my interest in railways, that made me discover the most remote station in Great Britain, in the middle of Rannoch Moor, Scotland.
"Starlings murmurations are a mystery about collective behaviour. Their shapes always catch us by surprise. Their how, why and what are always fascinating.
"For this piece I have processed the original murmurations recorded in Otmoor (Oxfordshire), by means of different transformative pipelines. I wanted to create something slightly mysterious, maybe menacing but not so much, as some murmurations and moors can be at times.
"May the music help listeners see and feel how those flocks become like a single massive entity, not only because they make a shape in the air but because, in this track, they are affected by a kind of transmogrification that turns them into otherworldly creatures. They then move the air, the whole sky fabric, in mysterious ways. Something in the way they move... "
Otmoor starlings reimagined by fectoper.