Sounds Of Nature

• Genre: Nature

About

Nature has been playing live for the last 4.5 billion years, yet it wasn't until the Holocene Epoch that she first entered the studio. Critics have long debated why. Some argue that her preoccupation with chaos theory and synchronicity prevented submission to the studio's strict regimen. It's an interesting angle: for several millennia, Nature's unorthodox performance methods were heavily inspired by free jazz and guerilla events like Burning Man. Under myriad aliases (Gaia, Mother Nature, Mother Earth, Planet Earth, Terra), she'd pop up when you'd least expect it, sometimes chirping like a flock of birds, other times crashing like thunder. For others, however, there's a far simpler explanation. Nature, they claim, was jamming when humans were nothing more than unicellular eukaryotes. Thus, it wasn't possible to commit her music to wax before Thomas Edison's arrival just last century. Either way, once Nature did start to record she quickly became a...force of Nature. Over the last 40 years she's dropped more killer albums than there are karaoke cassettes, spawning more followers than the Dead. That said, Nature stills lags far behind Michael Jackson in terms of record sales.

- Justin Farrar