Sanctioned Departures presents William Selman’s practice at its most porous, a work in which the composer’s primary act is to set conditions and then step aside. Rather than building pieces from pristine samples or studio‑bound synthesis, Selman gathers sound from two different kinds of rainforest: the temperate ecosystems of his Pacific Northwest home, and the tropical density of central and western Costa Rica. These environments supply a sprawling palette - tidal lagoons breathing with the tide, the muffled heat of saunas and volcanic springs, calls of forest primates, insect swarms like rolling static, the scrape of street sweepers, the clatter and hum of shellfish farms, the slow fizz of fermenting food, the resonant throats of caves. Each recording is already a small world; the album’s task is to let those worlds find one another.

Crucially, Selman resists the urge to force these materials into tidy narrative arcs. The sounds are, as the notes suggest, allowed to “guide themselves.” Combinations and transitions emerge that feel, at once, deeply intuitive and quietly baffling. A lagoon’s lap might fade not into another “water” sound but into the low thrum of urban cleaning machines; insect swarms might slip into the hiss of steam; primate calls might rhyme with the creak of wooden infrastructure or the drip inside a cave. Qualitatively defined categories - nature/culture, wild/domestic, liquid/solid, organic/mechanical - continually depart into uncategorizable hybrids. A sauna becomes a forest becomes a spring; shellfish farms echo with a kind of industrial birdsong.

This refusal to stabilise categories runs through the album’s imagery. “The shoreline isn’t clearly demarcated. Water overflows its banks and vessels. Sometimes the boundary of the forest and its opposite are impossible to define.” These are not just poetic lines; they describe how the piece actually behaves in the ear. Boundaries blur. The supposed edge between one environment and another is revealed as a gradient, a zone of seepage. At times, listening feels like standing where river and sea meet: salinity and fresh water sliding past each other in turbulent layers. Elsewhere, it is more like moving through fog, where distances and outlines continually shift and the distinction between “foreground” sound and “background” ambience becomes unstable.

Sonically, Selman works with a light but precise touch. The recordings are edited and placed with care, yet treatments are subtle enough that their constructed nature never overwhelms the sense of being in contact with real, contingent places. There is no bombastic processing, no dramatic reverb for its own sake; instead, gentle equalisation, cross‑fades and small spatial moves give the material room to suggest its own connections. A key pleasure of Sanctioned Departures lies in how it lets micro‑details remain intact: the particular grain of a swarm’s buzz, the specificity of a street sweeper’s rhythm, the way cave reverberation smears certain frequencies and leaves others intact. These details anchor the music even as its overall form drifts.

The notion of “sanctioned departures” cuts both ways. On one level, it describes a compositional strategy: the decision to let sounds depart from their expected roles, to sanction moves that lead away from descriptive “field recording” toward something more speculative and abstract. On another, it hints at a more general condition: the ways environments themselves are changing, shorelines literally redrawn by climate, forests fragmented, human infrastructures leaking into non‑human habitats and vice versa. Without making this theme explicit, the album encourages listeners to notice how porous these distinctions already are, how few truly untouched spaces remain, and how hybrid our acoustic world has become.

In the end, Sanctioned Departures offers not so much a portrait of two rainforests as an extended exercise in listening to how things meet. It is a record where water is never just water, where “nature” includes the rhythms of labour and maintenance, and where every discrete sound seems to carry traces of multiple places and times. Selman’s achievement is to make this complexity feel gentle rather than didactic: to invite the ear into a series of environments that are constantly slipping their names, and to trust that, given time and attention, the sounds will indeed guide themselves.