William Selman’s Sonic Taxonomy on ‘Sanctioned Departures’

“Sanctioned Departures” is not a typical field recording album. William Selman has built it around a personal classification method—a “thematic tagging system” that groups source material by instinct rather than science. The result is four long-form collages in which sounds are placed according to what they evoke, not what they are. It is a system that allows water to flow from melting ice into sauna steam, and for howler monkeys to share space with electromagnetic crackle.

The opening piece, “Through Frozen Words,” demonstrates the logic. What might have been a narrow study of cold environments becomes a study of water across states. Liquid noise, boiling, bubbling, and sheets of rain appear alongside electronic tones, as if temperature were a continuum and not a cut-off point. This refusal to separate like from unlike becomes the album’s operating principle. On the title track, gongs and drones ground the movement, unfolding slowly against an undercurrent of buried voices that surface and recede—a gesture toward language half-heard.

“Outside the Window” pushes the argument further, pairing howler monkey calls with the signal patterns of electromagnetic fields. One is organic communication, the other inorganic, but Selman’s arrangement suggests that both carry a kind of speech, even if science tends to dismiss the latter as pareidolia. “On Ground Level” then recombines elements from across the record—drones, gongs, field recordings—into a collage that mirrors the simultaneity of real-world soundscapes: a plane above a park, a factory floor, a submarine cable. The album’s juxtapositions never feel random. They reflect the unedited way our environments overlap, untidy and continually surprising.