Audio Landscapes 'There's Peace In The Centre Of Chaos'

I've been detecting a lot on the river recently mainly because all my fields are waterlogged so trying to detect on them is out of the question. I love hunting the river because it's forever changing and you never know what you're going to find. The tide has a habit of delivering you gifts when you least expect it, that's what makes it so different to the fields. In the fields once you've found what's there it isn't coming back, yes we can keep hunting a field but it will come to the point where everything that's available would've be dug.

When I think about different land and terrain I don't look upon it in a literal way, yes they're physical landscapes that we can walk on and touch, in regards to metal detecting, I look upon them as different "audio landscapes". Now this might sound anal and 'new-age' to some but to me it makes perfect sense. All terrains have their own language, me and my dad use to talk about this a lot, every field has it's own story in the way that targets are resting and what they're hiding between. Also what kind of past are they keeping buried, was it peaceful, labour ridden or the location of extreme death and suffering.

Audio Landscapes

Some are clean where all treasure is easily accessible, what I mean by this is, the audio landscape isn't cluttered with trash/white noise. These types of fields are lovely to detect with my Nexus machines using my larger coils because there's enough space within the audio to listen carefully for the deeper targets, and they're easy on the ear. Then we have the type of terrain that's loaded up with iron, and nestled between the iron is potential treasure, these types of audio landscapes are cluttered and your senses are being battered by audible gunfire and mortar explosions. It's these types of terrain many avoid due to how difficult they can be to detect but for me that's what attracts me to them the most.

I've always been interested in chaos, mainly audible, having been a drummer all my life, it has given me a different perspective on sound. I always described drumming to high energy music as controlled madness, it was within the centre of this madness that I found peace. It's like the eye of a storm, on the outside it's destroying everything in its way but within its centre there's a peace that can't really be explained.  Having turned my back on both music and drums, life is far too quiet nowadays and the 'noise' the world around me has to offer is something I have no interest in listening to, it's just an amplification of how sick and twisted the human condition has become.

Below is a video of my band Dogs, in the centre of this chaos I was at complete peace.

I had to go looking for a new kind of chaos and that's when the idea of detecting the foreshore came flying into my mind, but it was important that I approached it as organically as possible. It took me a while to adopt this approach. What Do I Mean By Organically? I didn't want what I was hearing to be controlled and manipulated by microprocessors and a nonthinking digital device, I had to find my feet first. I went from the Fisher F19 to the Equinox 800 and the Nokta Legend before I understood what I didn't want. 

Everything fell into place when I started to use my analog machines which consist of the Laser Rapier 2, Golden Mask 4WD and both +1 models and my Deeptech Vista X. The Rapier did quieten down the chaos but both the Golden Mask 4WD, +1 dual tone and Vista X enhanced it, I knew if I could find peace within the madness then treasure would follow. But let me remind you that my river hunting is all about pulling nonferrous out of the iron it matters not what the target is because if you master this through audio alone the treasure will eventually reveal itself. 

Less Is More When Chaos Is Involved

Due to the speed of the Golden Mask it enabled me to properly access areas that my previous machines couldn't really deal with. Now don't get me wrong, all my previous machines did brilliantly and I literally couldn't have praised the Nokta Legend enough. But when I got the Golden Mask in my hand, only then did I realise what I'd been missing. As explained in a recent blog, you don't have the customisation on the analog machines that you do on the digital gear. So the audio levels can't really be refined, but once both your brain and ears lock into the raw analog audio you start to really 'see' the ground beneath your feet within your minds eye.  

Everything mentioned in this blog might sound like pretentious bullshit, considering I spend most of my time digging trash out the ground. BUT that's what metal detecting is, it's an art to be mastered, what you end up finding is neither here nor there. Nowadays things are edited to make it look like the only thing in the ground is treasure and that's just not the case, with the hobby getting more popular, land is harder to come by. Not all of us are lucky enough to have super historic land so we have to make do with what we can get. I've mentioned it 100's of times now, it's all about the land you're on, if it's got a rich history then you'll find it, if it hasn't then you won't. That's why I call myself a metal detectorists, not a treasure hunter. Due to the way I like to approach my detecting I'd much rather make do with what I can get as opposed to joining clubs and group digs, I genuinely couldn't think of anything worse.