Unfinished Symphony: Albufera

Two in the morning. Save for the Saturday-into-Sunday night birds that swoop along the main road to and from the clubs and bars of the north and who create their sampling of engine rush and techno from the in-car system, the nights are quiet. With the arrival of May, the music of the machines will start to become unrelenting. But for now, there is motor silence. Not that there is silence.

During the day, it is hard to tell what noises come from Albufera. Those which there are, are usually drowned out by the incessant traffic. At night, it is a different matter. Amidst the quietness of the road, there is only one man-made sound that comes intermittently; the throb and sometimes roar of the Es Murterar power station, a rumbling synthesizer that conveys a mood music of mystery, an industrial electronica that is aurally surreal when set against the other sounds - those of the nature park. In April, in springtime, the sounds of Albufera build up, they are constant, always changing; they are their own unfinished symphonies.

In the mix of sound and limited vision, to the fore there is the sight of the puff monsters of pines silhouetted against moonlight or the distant lights of Muro and Sa Pobla. They are the maestros, the mute conductors of the orchestras that they hide. Unseen, in the pit of Albufera, whole string, horn and percussion sections stay up all night and play for a sleeping audience. They are the phantoms of an opera that the puff monsters mask.

It is too early for the crickets. In summer, they come to dominate, with their drum-box rhythms. For now, it is the marsh frogs that are the main percussion. It is subdued, understated at present. As the weeks pass, the frogs' chorus reaches a crescendo before being supplanted by the crickets in this unending and cyclical opus.

The music of the wetlands is variously symphonic, jazz orchestra or an ambient soundscape dreamt from the imagination of Brian Eno or Philip Glass. The syncopation of the frogs is a rapid chatter of scat drumming over which wails an improvised, viola screech of a startled barn owl or over which is the high-pitched piping blast of a scops owl. This jam session with its shifting members can bring the single, irregular hoot of a different owl, a sonic bleep that rises and falls as though it were being spun around on a radar screen.

The counterpoint to the melodies of nightingales and even robins are the crow-like bursts of a night heron on its discordant Ornette Coleman sax or the comedic intermezzo of a duck disturbed into a deranged trumpeting. The party animals that fly-dance to the tunes of the Albufera night club are the bats, darting and diving and ignoring the admonitory stares of the puff monster conductors.

You can sit and listen to all this. You can have a front-row seat for an astonishing concert that costs nothing. But you can't sit too long. Not before there is a different sound, one of a sawing buzz by the ear. The mosquitoes are alive again and they are giants in spring. The bats are hungry, thankfully. They do their best, but there are only so many mosquitoes they can eat as though they were chomping on their equivalent of popcorn taken into the auditorium for the Albufera concert.

As the night orchestra quietens around dawn, so a different shift takes over. There are over hundred different types of bird in Albufera at present, some that are there all the time, like the hoopoe which joins with the bats in being a natural destroyer of the nasty. For the hoopoe, it is the moth of the processionary caterpillar. Other birds are passing through, one or two are there by accident, such as the golden eagle. And most announce themselves as dawn comes, when they can be heard because the road is nearly always silent. Just at the moment.

The sights of Albufera, during the daytime when it can be seen, are what attracts, but there is a different attraction. What can't be seen but can only be heard. At night. The unfinished symphony of Albufera.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.