Tristan Louth-Robins

A beach strewn with seaweed on a clear afternoon at 5pm. I’m crouching over recording equipment listening to hydrophones which have been positioned near the incoming tide.

Escapades.

Two editions: 23-ish years apart.

Favourite film, favourite soundtrack.

By Adelaide standards, that is bonkers.

Éliane Radigue, black and white photograph.

"Radigue pursued an exciting musical life, moving from electroacoustic feedback to electronic music (with the help of her inseparable ARP 2500) and finally reinventing herself through fruitful collaborations with numerous instrumentalists.”

R.I.P. Éliane Radigue

buff.ly/ShlQoU5

Fruiting ruby saltbush: 🟢 -> 🟡 -> ❤️

A dalek piñata being whacked.

Smash the fash.

Metadata for this recording made at Langhorne Creek. An Anthropogenic subterranean freshwaters biome. Recorded on 2nd of May 2025 at approximately 2pm. Latitude, longitude: -35.292651, 139.04728. Weather conditions were: Sunny, warm and dry.

Descriptive notes: "On the outskirts of the Langhorne Creek township, a hydrophone is lowered into a roadside borehole. It's early May and an incredibly dry and warm mid-Autumn day. South Australia has been enduring one of its driest starts to a year"

Descriptive notes: "I'm out here on a field trip with Remko Leijs, an evolutionary biologist to listen into the subterranean soundscapes of boreholes.” "At the time of writing this field note (December 2025), the analysis is still inconclusive and due for some follow-up work. But the resulting recordings from the May 2025 field trip possess some fascinating and mysterious sounds. Edited here into a single track, you will hear the hydrophone at three positions in the borehole. "

Coffee-growing countries becoming too hot to cultivate beans, analysis finds Five countries responsible for 75% of world’s coffee supply record average of 57 extra days of coffee-harming heat a year In Ethiopia, the birthplace of coffee, more than 4m households rely on coffee as their primary source of income. It contributes almost a third of the country’s export earnings, but for how much longer is uncertain. “Coffee farmers in Ethiopia are already seeing the impact of extreme heat,” said Dejene Dadi, the general manager of Oromia Coffee Farmers Cooperatives Union (OCFCU), a smallholder cooperative. Continue reading...

Coffee-growing countries becoming too hot to cultivate beans, analysis finds

Lots of cumulus clouds spanning the skyline and into the distance.

Full blown Dali clouds.

January 2026: two decades of blogging, system thinking and granulation Introduction (notes on 20 years of blogging) As I was writing up the surrounding items for this month’s post it occurred to me that I’ve been maintaining blogs for 20 years. As this tho…

Latest blog
tristanlouthrobins.wordpress.com/2026/02/15/j...

A native ruby saltbush after one year’s growth in our back garden

Six ripe figs

Two nice things: 1) the native Ruby Saltbush I planted last year is going gangbusters during a very hot and dry Adelaide summer + it’s about to fruit. 2) these six figs from our neighbours overhanging tree.

Book “The Breath Of The Gods” by Simon Winchester.

A Xmas present from my mum which I’ve now got the (head)space to dive into.

I'm convinced AI is our generation's radium - a discovery with genuinely useful applications in specific, controlled circumstances that we stupidly put in everything from kid's toys to toothpaste until we realised the harm far too late where future generations will ask if we were out of our minds.

Boycott. Buy albums and merch from the artists.

Oh goodness, I needed that. The right kind of chaos the world need now.

Drawings of Kangaroo Island fossils provide inspiration for stamp series Colourful illustrations by Peter Trusler depict 500m-year-old fossils of creatures from the Palaeozoic and inspire Australia Post

www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

Reef at Little Gorge Beach at low tide at 2pm. A smoke haze can be seen at Rapid Bay in the distance. The smoke is from the ongoing bushfire at Deep Creek on the southern end of the Fleurieu Peninsula.

Latent smell of smoke from the Deep Creek bushfire. Smoke haze over Rapid Bay in the distance, from here in Little Gorge Beach. Earlier I drove as far south as Delamere. Roads are open, but I took the hint to not go further. The cabin smelt of smoke almost immediately as I passed the general store.

For context, this was the driest January in 17 years for SE Australia. The rainfall deficiencies since 2023 are alarming and heat records have been shattered across SA, Victoria and NSW this past fortnight.

A map generated by the South Australian Country Fire Service indicating the current Watch and Act area for an out of control bushfire burning through Deep Creek National Park and adjacent properties on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula.

The current out of control bushfire in the south of the beautiful Fleurieu Peninsula has already burned through parts of Deep Creek, homes and businesses. Then there’s the native flora and fauna. This has not been an easy SA summer. It is hot, dry and windy w/ no rain in sight anytime soon.

Take me down to the Parallax city where the far moves slow and the near moves quickly

‘It’s not too late to fix it’: web inventor Tim Berners-Lee says he is in a ‘battle for the soul’ of the internet Founder of the world wide web says commercialisation means the net has been ‘optimised for nastiness’, but collaboration and compassion can prevail

“I would like to see a Cern for AI, where all the top scientists come together and see whether they can make a super intelligence. And, if they can, they contain it into a system where it can’t just go out and persuade people to let it run the world.”

www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

HISTORIC HEAT IN AUSTRALIA
Climatic history is set to be rewritten with an absolutely deadly week:
Today 48.5C in South Australia,47.2 New South Wales,
45.3 Queensland,45.0 Victoria

‼️We might expect 7 CONSECUTIVE DAYS >46C in New South Wales and we can't rule out 50C.
A HELL

Exploring scikit-maad – False Colour Spectrum analysis Introduction In the previous (rather distant) blog post, I began an exploration of Python’s powerful soundscape analysis package, scikit-maad with a demonstration of how you can easily render…

Alright! Getting this year off to a fine start with a much-overdue post on the data science blog examining false colour spectrum analysis of soundscapes.

wranglingintheantipodes.wordpress.com/2026/01/25/e...

#falsecolour #python #soundscapes #acousticecology #scikit

That would be such a shame, Yes.

Cat wandered in front of the camera during the #aurora long exposure

December 2025: A EOY wrap-up (of sorts) and the sound map update Following last month’s extensive write-up on a week of travels in Scotland during October, I’ve decided to rein things in and give the travel writing a pause for this month and stick to…

A new blog post mostly picking apart the recent sound map update. tristanlouthrobins.wordpress.com/2026/01/19/d...