I could never have imagined just how textural the sounds of birds could be. Generally, we hear them as punctuations of speech in the natural world and not as the rich tapestry of interwoven dimensional space that they are. Dauby plays a bit with these calls, truncating them and at other times looping them so that they become like melodious feedback on a massive scale. Between what our Corvid contributors utter, Yannick commits to disc some truly terrifying drones. Like vibrating metal structures in the sun, according to the information provided by the artist. You are right there with him in the Estonian wilderness as the high grass cascades and the piercing blue skies hem everything in.Each track on here is given a time specific designation and curiously enough, almost all of these were either recorded or composed in June. Now June generally is not a month I find myself enjoying much due to the heat and lack of children being confined to school where they belong, but I am going to pay much closer attention to what goes on out there this time around. Apparently, while the sun beats down, there's a microcosm of linguistics just beneath the waves of heat that one can hear, if they have the right set of ears. Listening to Lind, Raud has re-calibrated mine.The dissonant reverberations of crudely formed machinery having it's very being tapped, touched and now and then tormented. These longer pieces which are put together serve to become reference points to the short bursts of the natural world on display which are being cataloged. Sure, it would be easy to just disregard the details and focus solely on what has the most prominent duration but one thing I have learned over the years when listening to material such as this is that the spaces in between what you can perceive contain what will fascinate you the most. In plainer terms, Songs of Bird and Metal is what I'd happily classify as auditory black matter.Far out there in the woods, across the thickets bursting with insects and their shadowy avian hunters, through the burnt and sun baked high country to finally far above the tree line where the air claws at your lungs... somewhere in all of this isolated and forlorn splendor, amongst the ruins of what man has wrought Yannick Dauby runs up the flag and that flag is Lind, Raud. Birds and metal. Flesh, blood and iron willed instinctual composition which flows together to form a mosaic for the secret, insular world of what was before us and surely what will endure long after we are gone. The second half of the equation comes at us now, four out of three. An intriguing conceptual conceit, men and their microphones... microphones and men. Aastaajad is a testament to the powerful abilities which this collection of artists brandished through the clever capturing of the natural world. As time passes, I find myself listening to field recordings as a style more and more; there is nothing more impressive than having the ability to cajole the randomness of the world outside onto a silver platter. I don't know the methodology involved but I imagine that work such as this takes incredible amounts of perseverance and reserves of patience I simple do not possess. Then again, thanks to this trio, I don't have to.But I am amazed at the details and overall zealousness of purpose Aastaajad is comprised of. Part one commences with what sounds like a major wind storm already in progress, the kind of disorienting chaos that would wipe the magnetic North off the face of your compass. There is a faintly echoing call across it's expansive wrath that I cannot make out, if I had to guess I would say the crosswind which presaged it but I'm no meteorologist. From there we venture into warmer climes with one section entirely devoted to what sound like footfalls in the sodden ground pressing up a decrepit trail to the scenic view above, over and over they fall hammering out a relentless cadence of turmoil and toil. I think Dauby had a lot of fun manipulating these sounds as so many of them are arranged to form a kind of broken, staccato of rhythm.Next it is back into the insect world, in particular the flies one finds in the dead heat of midday. Through my headphones I was thoroughly immersed into their perilous, skittery routine. Forever scanning above for the circling birds who spell their doom, these creatures via the technological wizardry of this album, got right next to my ear and once I found myself swatting away at the empty air.Perhaps the colder tones of this record can be explained by the fact that all four pieces on here were recorded from November through May. It may be the intention of the composers to guide us along on an auditory trek through the changes which the seasons bring. The idea to use only winter and spring is an intriguing one. To lop off the anchoring weight of one transitional period and yet leave the other as only transition, this kind of metamorphic art is seen often in nature but rarely in the electronic realm. And it is this root which may best explain what is going on here, the one connective thread of light moving through the subtly altered terrain which nature readily provides but only the minds of gifted individuals can sift through.You will hear harmonies made from the singing soil beneath their feet, through the air a chorus of jabbering mandibles and screaming wings will captivate. Put on Aastaajad the next time you have a group of people around and observe the results, my wager is that innate and deeply interred instincts will begin to emerge. Without doubt, these are no mere dabblings with the occult subtext of what lies outside, they are finely tuned incantations which have been composed to index the full spectrum of the elements with an exhaustingly studious eye.