Gruenrekorder Follows Wetlands Success with Magdaléna Manderlová’s Five-Year Study of the Opava Floodplain

Gruenrekorder continues its water-themed season. After last year’s Sounds of the Wetlands, one of the sharper field recording albums of 2025, the German label has returned to marshy ground with two new releases. The first is Magdaléna Manderlová’s Kozmické louky, a record that took five years to assemble at the Opava River wetlands along the Polish border of the Czech Republic.

This is a floodplain once marked as endangered. It has since begun a slow recovery, though the pressures of climate change still sit heavy on its long-term stability. Manderlová’s recordings treat the site as a living composition, paying close attention to the way its inhabitants sound when they are not being observed by anything except a microphone.

Side A runs through seasonal and atmospheric shifts. “Probouzení” (Awakening) builds a dense chorus of wetland life while letting the hum of nearby traffic bleed through. It’s an honest choice. Protected zones have edges, and those edges are audible here. “Intenzita” is a wall of birds, chaotic and tightly packed, while a later piece isolates wing flaps and a thin, whistling creature whose pitch bends like air leaving a balloon. Rain closes the side, soft at first, then interrupted by the low grind of a motor.

Manderlová opens Side B to guest composers. Peter Cusack sharpens the field with assertive tones on “Wind in the Face.” Lucie Páchová brings church bells to “Mokřad,” lending the wetland an unexpected stillness before human percussion and distant singing enter the frame. Michal Kindernay finds a drone and answers it with one of his own. There’s also a live score performed by human participants imitating natural sounds, and a conversation with a relative, Věra, woven into the sequence. It closes with Adela Mede and clarinetist-composer Klaus Ellerhusen Holm forming a human chorus over the stream.

The album works as a document of a specific place at a specific time, when regrowth is real but not guaranteed. Gruenrekorder has a companion release, Ghostly Waters, covering the River Calder. That one will get its own focus tomorrow.