Interview #5: Alice Boyd on field recording, "I was going to be a clown", part 1

7/07/25

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Hello dear reader,

Today, I’m interviewing Alice Boyd, a South London based composer, sound designer and performer with a wicked work ethic, exceptional in-depth knowledge of field recording and a good, good heart. I pick her up from Canterbury Station. The heat is staggering, so I instruct her to sit in the backseat behind me, as my left window won’t wind down and my AC doesn’t work. We raise our voices over the rushing wind, trying to understand each other, voicing the obligatory “how have you been?” and “hot, isn’t it?”.

The first thing I notice about Alice is that she is deeply attuned; to the emotional impact of sound, the ethics of everything she does, and the people around her. Her music has been championed on BBC Radio 3, 4 and 6, including Night Tracks on BBC Radio 3, and her main focus has been to work solely with the natural world around us; honouring it, documenting it and highlighting it to us, her audience.

She tells me about a recent project with legendary field recordist Martyn Stewart, retracing the sonic footsteps from when he first recorded the environment compared to how the landscape he recorded has transformed since (it has - dramatically so). Together, they explored ‘solastalgia’, the grief of witnessing environmental change in a place you still inhabit, or in Alice’s case, experiencing it secondhand through Martyn.

Right now, she’s travelling all across the UK to capture immersive field recordings and conversations with people who live and work closely with the land for the podcast ‘As The Season Turns’.

Stodmarsh, photo credit: Catrin Vincent

We meet at Stodmarsh Nature Reserve in Canterbury, something called a ‘wetland’, mainly because this is the one place it makes sense to meet. I’ve been rehearsing with my guitarist, who lives here, and it’s been easy enough for Alice to hop on a train. I’ve never been here before. It stretches out for miles. Kites spread their huge wings to soar through the air as insects freely roam from flower to flower.

A ‘wetland’ is a land area that is saturated or flooded with water, either permanently or seasonally. Wetlands contain unique soil and vegetation adapted to the wet conditions, removing pollutants from the water, absorbing large amounts of rainfall for flood control and storing twice as much carbon as forests do. They need to be protected, and this one clearly is.

We pick a shady spot in front of a teeming pond, dodge the numerous splattered bird poo on a bench, and I whip out my phone to hit record.

C: I am here at Stodmarsh Nature Reserve, Canterbury with none other than Alice Boyd. How are you today, Alice?

A: I'm doing okay. It's a very hot day and the sun is quite strong so we're sort of sitting in this dappled light. Today I'm doing pretty good.

C: We're in front of an algae-filled pool but we've sat down because I'm having an allergic reaction and I can't walk any further for a bit. I've got hives, I've eaten some kind of nut that I shouldn't have eaten, but it's okay. I've taken an antihistamine and it's all going to be okay.

And Alice Boyd is an incredible musician who has done so much work with hydrophones, with nature, with a live band. You played a gig at the Eden Project recently, right?

A: That was cool. Not super recently - it was 2022 - but it was definitely probably my career highlight.

C: Did I not see you play with Daisy recently?

A: That was with Daisy, yeah. I know, I know, time is weird. It was like the first thing she did with me.

C: Oh my god, that feels like…that feels like last year. That’s so funny. What the hell.

A: What the heck. What in the world? Maybe you went in the time machine without realising it and saw it from afar or something.

C: Maybe I’m in a tesseract, like in Interstellar. Maybe time is folding in on itself and I’m like, the Eden Project was yesterday!

A: No, it was 20 years ago. It was 40 years ago.

C: Tell me about the Eden Project, just out of interest. What path led you there?

A: I feel like my career life has been a bit of a wiggly line. The Eden Project was sort of the thing that saved me from getting another office job during the lockdown. Before the pandemic I was working mostly in the theatre industry making sound design for mostly climate-related shows and making the music for it.

Before that I was working in an environmental charity. I’d quit the environmental charity to go freelance. Nine months later, the pandemic happened and all that theatre work disappeared. So I was in a bit of a free fall, I guess. I was like, what am I gonna do with my life?

My alternate timeline was to go become a clown. Me and my friend Rosa had this comedy climate drag show and we opened it the weekend before the first lockdown. We had planned to go to the Edinburgh Fringe, to tour it, and to go to clown school in Paris.

C: You were going to clown school in Paris?

A: There's another world, another life, where I am now a clown somewhere, probably also like waiting tables. Who knows?

C: What a career you've built, to go from that to…this. My old band released our debut album the first week COVID hit. It completely obliterated it. I think it’s so fascinating how everyone had this whole other life planned, but had to completely change what they were doing. And it's a limitation, like, a path being closed. And it’s interesting what those limitations inspired in people.

A: As much as I liked the idea of that path, I think I already knew inside that it maybe wasn't what I wanted to do. I think I would have liked to have done it, but I think it would have been even harder than doing music and sound. Like, being a clown… that's a hard career.

C: Oh god, I'm choking a bit…from the nuts.

A: Do you want to stop?

C: It’s okay. I’m okay.

So, when you were thinking about clown school, which is amazing, was there a part of your brain that was like; I swear I'm meant for nature recording? Was there a part of you that knew that it wasn't what you were going to do?

A: I think there was something inside of me. Sometimes I have the opposite feeling now. But there was something inside of me that felt…I mean, maybe it's being a short baby-faced woman…but I wanted to be taken seriously. I think I had a bit of a chip on my shoulder about not being taken seriously. Clowning was almost that to the extreme. Maybe it would have been rebellious to do that and keep pushing that. But I could feel something inside of myself that wanted to be a bit more like, “no, I really mean this”.

Whereas now I’ve had the opposite reaction. I swung the other way for a while and became quite serious in my nature of sound recording. Some friends were like, “Alice, your vibe particularly on social media has changed quite drastically from wearing a moustache and looking like an idiot” to maybe being a bit too serious. I found that to be quite an interesting thing. We feel like we have to have one brand - and I hate the word brand - but actually we’re quite multifaceted as human beings.

C: You've got a real comedy side. You're so funny.

A: Thank you.

C: Phoebe Bridgers was a good example of that. In her songs, it’s some really sad, deep stuff. In interviews, she was funny. On social media too, although I think she’s taken a huge break from everything, now, though. Do you ever feel like having to think about how you're perceived takes you away from anything?

A: It definitely does. At some points I've really cared about it. Like…what if people perceive me in this way? What if this thing that I'm sharing is embarrassing or lame? Or what if the people I think are cool don't think what I'm doing is cool? And then there have been other times where I've been like, “you know what, I don't care”.

On social media particularly, I think because I've done stuff, say, at the Eden Project, or because some things I've done have been with venues where I want to present myself professionally; at the same time I have friends from school following me on Instagram. How do you talk to both of those people at the same time?

C: I gave up on talking to anyone. I just can't. I'd love to give everyone the same attention but my brain is finite.

A: Definitely.

C: So talk me through this: clown school ends, the dream dies, it's COVID. What happens next?