In a Noise-Saturated City, Angelenos Are Learning to Listen Together

HIGHLAND PARK, Los Angeles — On a muggy Tuesday evening behind a vintage clothing shop on Figueroa Street, two dozen people sit in folding chairs beneath a shade sail, facing a pair of high-fidelity speakers. A helicopter chops overhead. Parrots screech in the eucalyptus. Somewhere, a siren winds up and down. But the room falls silent when the playback begins: the mechanical chug of a fax machine, recorded in an office somewhere, its handshake tones and paper-feed rhythms filling the parking lot like a string quartet.

When the recording ends, the audience applauds.

This is a listening session of the Los Angeles Field Recording Club, a nine-month-old collective that has turned the solitary practice of capturing environmental sound into a communal ritual. Founded in June 2025 by musician and community-radio DJ George Jensen, the club now draws roughly 25 regulars to its bimonthly gatherings — alternating between field outings at sonically distinctive locations and indoor listening sessions where members share what they’ve caught.

The phenomenon reflects a broader cultural moment. As generative AI floods the internet with synthetic audio and algorithmic playlists flatten musical discovery, a counter-movement has coalesced around phonography — the art of recording the world as it sounds, unmediated. Similar collectives have emerged in New York, Chicago, London, and Tokyo, often connected through the World Listening Project and the acoustic ecology tradition pioneered by composer R. Murray Schafer in the 1970s. But Los Angeles, with its sprawl of freeways, foothills, industrial corridors, and fragmented wilderness, offers a soundscape of unusual complexity.

“L.A. is such a driving city,” Jensen said. “Field recording gives people a reason to pull over and listen for a purpose.”

Jensen, 42, had been making field recordings for over a decade before launching the club, initially for his show “Los Angeles” on KCHUNG Radio and the online station Dublab. His recordings captured everything from the dawn chorus in Griffith Park to the ambient hum of strip-mall parking lots. When a friend asked whether any local field-recording groups existed, Jensen found none — so he started one. The first meeting spilled onto the sidewalk.

“I was like, whoa, this is crazy,” he recalled.

The club’s structure solves a paradox at the heart of the practice: field recording is inherently solitary — any movement or breath contaminates the take — yet practitioners crave community. Jensen’s outings allow participants to record in parallel, then reconvene to compare results. At a recent session in the Sepulveda Basin Wildlife Reserve, artist Whitney Richardson deployed a hydrophone in the reservoir while newcomer Amy Ma, drawn by an Instagram algorithm that also served her “Clown Cardio” content, used only her iPhone. Eric Buechel, a veteran recordist attending for the first time, came mainly to see what gear others were using.

“Hey, that’s a recorder too,” Jensen tells phone-only participants. The democratization is real: modern smartphones capture 44.1 kHz/16-bit audio sufficient for most artistic purposes, and apps like Rode Report or Voice Memos require zero setup. But the club also includes professionals like Sam Hamer, a production sound mixer who values the discipline the practice imposes. “I catch myself if I’m fidgeting, so it makes me sit still,” Hamer said. “Otherwise, I hear myself on the recording.”

That enforced stillness — what practitioners call “deep listening” — has become a selling point in an attention-fractured culture. Sherman Aline, who captured the wing-brush of mating dragonflies on an entry-level Tascam, described the effect as therapeutic: “It’s relaxing. And I feel like if you’re recording, it’s easier to be present.”

The club’s output is accumulating. Members have recorded the reverb of Union Station interrupted by teenagers on electric bikes — a sonic snapshot of a transit mode that barely existed five years ago — the steam vent of a volcanic fissure in Northern California, goats wearing bells on a Greek island captured in quadraphonic surround, and the “ploop” of fish jumping beneath the drone of the 405 Freeway at Sepulveda Basin. Jensen encourages contributors to provide context: a mallard quack stripped of background noise serves a different purpose than the same quack embedded in its habitat, complete with distant traffic and wind in the reeds.

In March, the club published its first Field Guide, a printed journal distributed at events with logging pages for metadata — date, time, coordinates, equipment, weather — alongside prompts and space for the stories behind recordings. A digital Sound Map, geolocating members’ uploads, is slated to launch on the club’s website this fall. Both artifacts position the group within a lineage that includes the British Library Sound Archive and the Library of Congress, institutions that have preserved field recordings since the wax-cylinder era. Eight-year-old Ludwig Koch made what is widely considered the first such recording in 1889: a captive white-rumped shama bird, captured on his father’s Edison phonograph.

For Jensen, the stakes are epistemological. “I feel like now everything’s so … doctored,” he said. “But when you’re recording, this is what’s really happening. You’re hearing real sound. You’re engaged with the world in a real way.”

The next outing is scheduled for October 18 at 10 a.m. at the Old Los Angeles Zoo in Griffith Park, where ruined enclosures and overgrown paths have become a haven for birds, hikers, and the occasional coyote. Details are posted on the club’s Instagram.

At the Highland Park listening session, Buechel cued his Sepulveda Basin recording: freeway rush, aircraft approaches, the sudden splash of fish. The group sat motionless. When the speakers fell quiet, they clapped again — and somewhere, someone was probably recording the applause.