SITE is a collaborative conceptual series curated by Driftworks and Audiobulb Records, exploring the relationship between sound and place. Each edition invites artists to recreate their personal perception of a location, blending environmental sounds and imagery to capture the unique ‘audio-geography’ of our world.
This album grew out of listening at home—paying close attention to the quiet systems, routines, and environmental sounds that shape everyday life, and to the unexpected patterns and textures that emerge when those sounds are carefully observed. It is part of an ongoing collaborative series exploring the relationship between sound and place, in which each edition invites an artist to translate a specific location into sound—an audio geography shaped by proximity, duration, and personal perception.
For this contribution, I focused on the domestic interior of my home in Weatogue, Connecticut, surrounded by the quiet of the countryside. The material is drawn from everyday systems and subtle activity within the house, alongside the faint presence of the landscape beyond it. These sounds are reshaped and layered, moving between sustained atmospheres and more detailed passages, where rhythm, pulse, noise, and repetition form slowly evolving structures.
The home is treated both as a lived-in space and as an acoustic framework. Rooms shape and filter sound, surfaces hold resonance, and elements from outside — weather, distance, night—move gently across the threshold. Mechanical cycles and environmental textures interact with glitch processes and considered uses of noise, producing a listening environment rich in variation and detail.
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1. Cold Remains
2. Measured Warmth
3. Water That Holds
4. Before the Pour
5. Distant Light
6. Warmth Beneath the Floor
7. When Outside Stays
8. Time Practices Repetition
9. A Room Closes
10. The House Listens
As with the series as a whole, this work encourages attentive listening. Place is approached not as something fixed or purely calm, but as active and continually unfolding through use, repetition, and time. The album invites the listener to remain with these sounds as they shift, combine, and reveal new patterns within a familiar space.
Underlying the album are quiet field recordings drawn from everyday domestic
environments: the low hum of a refrigerator, the pulse of a microwave, water moving
through a kitchen sink, tea brought slowly to a boil, distant television sound, the steady breath of a furnace, rain against a window, the measured click of a metronome, the acoustics of a bathroom, and the indistinct textures of night. These familiar sounds are reduced, stretched, and recontextualized, allowing the ordinary to become abstract—heard not as objects, but as atmosphere, memory, and time passing.
Jeff Düngfelder: field recordings, tape loops and synthesizers
Music composed & constructed by Jeff Düngfelder
Design by Jeff Düngfelder
Recorded from November 2025 - February 2026
Mixed & Mastered at the Hopmeadow Studio, Weatogue, Connecticut
www.umlaut.work
Ümlaut is Jeff Düngfelder, a U.S. experimental composer/sound artist now based in the northern Connecticut countryside. The thematic concepts distinguishing his work are absence and silence; the ineffable exchange between viewer and image; random moments of stillness within a landscape in flux. Using a minimalistic, electro-acoustic approach, his elusive patchwork of field recordings and electronics merge with the world of shadows and colours. Allowing for infinite possible interpretations, he lets the listener’s imagination fill in the blanks between the grainy textural sounds with elements of ambient, musique concrète and noise. Combining spaciousness with a sense of intimacy introduces a musical language of experimental ambience. His memory recordings expose the complex relationship between music and silence.
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