2026 stock. Sold out at source, very last copies around. In 1961 the Danish painter Knud Viktor moved to the Luberon hills of Provence, following the light that had once drawn Van Gogh south. He barely painted there. The cicadas got to him first - thousands of them, settling on the walls and on his skin, falling silent the instant a cloud crossed the sun. Within a few years he had set down his brushes and picked up a microphone, and he spent the rest of his life listening to a single mountain. Viktor called the results images sonores - sound images - and refused the words music, composer, musique concrète. He thought of himself as a painter still, working now in sound, and as a kind of poet of his own small patch of earth. With microphones he built himself, he learned to capture what no one was meant to hear: a worm chewing through an apple, a spider drawing out its web, ants drumming the ground with their bodies, the slow erosion of the nearby Gorges du Régalon. Ambiances and Images, the two albums gathered here, were issued in tiny editions in the early 1970s and have been close to impossible to find ever since.

The first record opens out into the wider weather of the mountain - long stretches of air, wind, rain on stone, the massed pulse of insects rising and falling with the heat. The second moves in close. Inspired by Debussy's lifelong fascination with water and play, its pieces are built from single sources - drops of water, the friction of a cicada, a fly, a voice - slowed and layered until a falling droplet becomes a bell and an insect's wing becomes a drone. Viktor leaves much of it recognizable, trusting the creatures' own rhythm and melody to carry the piece. The effect is intimate and faintly vertiginous: the sound of a man kneeling very close to the ground and turning up the volume on the world.

He was not entirely alone in this. His neighbour was Jean-Claude Roché, the great French ornithologist and bird-recordist, who wrote the original sleeve notes for these albums and who, decades later, transferred the very same tapes for reissue. Viktor's instincts ran parallel to Pierre Schaeffer and the Paris studios of musique concrète - the fixed sound object, the vari-speed manipulation - but where they worked in laboratories, he worked in a field, and the difference is everything. Long before the term existed, he was a sound ecologist, a self-described citizen of the earth keeping an acoustic record of one place.

That record has since become an elegy. By the early 1970s Viktor already heard his valley thinning out, its life pressed back by farming and pesticide, and many of the insects and animals he caught on tape have since vanished from the Luberon altogether. What survives them is here: their imprints, like fossils, pressed into the grooves. Restored from the original tapes by the Institut for Dansk Lydarkæologi - the Institute for Danish Sound Archaeology - and spread across two LPs alongside a selection of Viktor's own paintings, photographs and film stills, Ambiances / Images returns one of the strangest and most tender bodies of work in twentieth-century field recording to circulation. Essential.