This recording was made as part of Disquiet Junto Project 0005: “Layering Reality”. The instructions for the project were as follows:

“The fifth Junto project is about amplifying the inherent musicality of everyday life. Of all the Junto projects so far, this one may call for the lightest touch. Of course, achieving a light touch may require the most amount of work. The project will be accomplished by adding sounds (notes, riffs, tones, beats, noises, processing, drones, what have you) to a foundation track that consists of an original, unedited field recording.”

Find more information about the Disquiet Junto group here:

Disquiet Junto/

As I thought about the project, I considered the term “field recording” and thought about finding a nearby location for a field recording that might be different from locations available to other participants. I live in the middle of a region of the United States referred to as the Permian Basin that has produced and continues to produce large amounts of oil. My hometown only exists today because oil was discovered nearby in 1927. The landscape surrounding me is decorated with thousands of pumpjacks, some moving, some still, and each with its own unique soundtrack, so oil is a big part of our everyday life here. For this reason, I decided to make an (oil)field recording using the sound of a working pumpjack.

Easier said than done. It’s not difficult to find a pumpjack that emits a discernible sound, but I also live in an area that’s extremely flat and where the wind tends to blow nonstop during winter and spring. I fought with the wind noise for a while before deciding that it was such a part of the fabric of life in the Permian Basin oilfields that the wind noise had every right to be a part of my recording.

Now, if you don’t know what a pumpjack looks like, imagine a large steel A-frame with an even larger beam balanced atop. At one end of this beam (called the walking beam) is a large steel head called the horse’s head. When the pumpjack operates, the walking beam tilts back and forth and the horse’s head bobs up and down. Each time the horse’s head rises, it pulls a long rod, called a sucker rod, out of the well bore. Each up and down cycle lasts about six seconds. The movement of the sucker rod up and down the well bore moves oil to the surface. I found a suitable pumpjack with an interesting squawk that happened each time the walking beam tilted and the horse head rose, pulling the sucker rod up out of the ground.

I made this recording from a distance of about fifty yards, which means the sound of the engine that runs the pumpjack isn’t discernible, especially over the wind noise. But the squawk is there, and that’s what I was most interested in capturing.

In the final third of this base field recording I returned to my vehicle and listened to the squawking of the pumpjack through my open window, out of the wind. I considered using only this cleaner version of the pumpjack squawk, but ultimately decided to allow the wind noise to remain for the first part of the recording. It’s part of the aural fabric of the oilfield, just as surely as the whirr of computer fans is part of the aural fabric of the office that I spend my days in.

The only addition to my field recording was a sound from a drum kit included with Ableton Live called GranularStretch. The “Toy Box” instrument from that kit was added at an interval that mimics the rhythm of the pumpjack squawk.