Four contemporary field-recording types from Portugal on Lisboa Soa: Sounds within Sounds (CRÓNICA207-2023). Lisboa Soa calls itself a Festival, but it seems to be a lot more than that – growing some sort of locus for like-minded fellows to gather and thrive, and propounding the notion of “acoustic ecology”, grounded in ethical ideas about our shared environment. They believe we can achieve a lot just through the simple act of listening. This particular release was a commission, delivering new works from João Castro Pinto, Sara Pinheiro, Mestre André and Ana Guedes. However, it seems none of them roamed the wilderness with their tape machines to collect new sounds, and instead all four pieces have been assembled using existing tapes stored in the Festival’s archives. Mixed results; I get the feeling everyone was a bit too respectful to the sources and didn’t feel inclined to try anything especially bold or daring, although moments of Mestre André’s ‘No Earlids’ serve up a few pebbles and twigs of dramatic noise, and Guedes does at least make the effort to transform the original tapes on her ‘Splicing_archives_’. Very few specific environmental sounds emerge from this processed and layered melange, and one starts to wonder what exactly we are hearing. I find this lack of contextual detail vaguely troubling; the notes supplied by each creator tell us more about their selection methods and their multi-channel spatialisations than they do about the earth’s environment. Ed Pinsent