Little Atoms 231 – Road Trip 13 – Bernie Krause

In this episode, Neil Travels to Glen Ellen, in Northern California and meets with musician and naturalist Bernie Krause. A former member of seminal folk band The Weavers, (he replaced Pete Seeger as guitarist), Bernie Krause became a pioneer of electronic music, studying at Mills College under Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pauline Oliveros, and later popularised the Moog synthesizer. As part of the duo Beaver & Krause, he worked on the soundtrack for many iconic 70’s films, such as Apocalypse Now, Rosemary’s Baby and Performance.

For more than forty years Krause has traveled the World recording and archiving the sounds of creatures and environments large and small. He has recorded more than fifteen thousand species and four thousand hours of wild soundscapes, over half of which no longer exist in nature due to encroaching noise and human activity. Bernie Krause is the author of The Great Animal Orchestra. Inspired by Bernie, Neil has added a selection of wild soundscapes to this interview, recorded on a walnut farm belonging to the anthropologist Sarah Hrdy, in Winters, California.