thruoutin’s ‘Tchefuncte Soundmap’ Documents a River’s Compromised Quiet

In the tradition of Annea Lockwood’s cartographic sound works—her Hudson, Danube, and Housatonic river maps—Brad Seippel, recording as thruoutin, has turned his ears to a lesser-known waterway. Tchefuncte Soundmap traces the 70-mile Louisiana river from source to Lake Pontchartrain, assembling an hour and forty-four minutes of location recordings that resist the pastoral ideal.

The album begins not with water, but with birdsong and distant traffic. Seippel initially considered these intrusions imperfections, then accepted them as honest elements of the current biophony. Throughout the work, the river moves in and out of earshot: children play at Bogue Falaya Park, a truck passes at I-12 Bridge, and finally the water surges fully into the foreground at Bogue Falaya Park 2. The presence of alligators—heard only as splashes—adds a low threat that undermines any fantasy of untouched nature.

Seippel’s recordings make clear that few places along the Tchefuncte avoid human spillover. In shorter pieces like “Guste,” wind, water, and wildlife briefly converge without interruption. But the sequence often asks a larger question: what do we expect from nature when escape is no longer possible? The album includes interviews with a park ranger and a lifelong resident, grounding its abstractions in people who know the river’s changes intimately. The historic 1837 lighthouse marks the endpoint, a symbol of navigation in a landscape where the relationship between natural and manmade has never been simple.