2182 Distribution Note:

In light of the current situation regarding shipping and tariffs, 2182 has started to maintain stock of foreign labels that have similar aims so that folks stateside can support these labels.

2182 has stock of all twenty-one titles in the Saamleng catalog. The price for all items is $10 and you can review title descriptions on this listing and on the Saamleng bandcamp account.

Through January 2026, if you order two or more Saamleng titles, 2182 will include a 2182 title for you at no cost. Please just choose which titles you would like in the notes.

The stateside shipping, which this listing is limited to, is 6 dollars and 1 additional dollar per title. For 50 dollars, you can get four titles including shipping.

Thank you to Tomek and Saamleng for their support.

Khmer & Siam Recordings
Mirt
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The album collects recordings from Mirt's first visit to Thailand and Cambodia in 2013 that inspired the creation of the Saamleng label. It documents an encounter with foreign soundscapes where anthropophony intertwines with natural sounds in a completely different way than what the ear of a European resident is accustomed to. Despite being barely a postcard — half-diary, half-journey in itself in retrospect — the album's strength lies in its attention to details that become too familiar as we get to know foreign places better and start to ignore them.

Istanbul. Aux Oreilles D'un Etranger
Rafał Kołacki
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Rafał Kołacki, an archaeologist, ethnologist, and cultural activist studying the anthropology of sound and urban soundscapes, documents his visit to Istanbul. The album consists of one long recording presenting a collage of street sounds, work noises, prayers, and local music, capturing the layered sonic fabric of this city straddling two continents. It presents the acoustic atmosphere of Istanbul through the ears of a stranger, where the familiar and the foreign constantly overlap, and where the call to prayer mingles with the rumble of traffic and the voices of street vendors.

Bikes in Hanoi, Bats in Phong Nha
Mirt
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The album juxtaposes two contrasting soundscapes recorded in Vietnam: the sounds of bustling streets in Hanoi and the biophony of one of the world's largest caves near Phong Nha and its surroundings. Despite their differences, both parts capture incredibly intense sonic environments. The album questions Raymond Murray Schafer's division into hi-fi and lo-fi soundscapes, especially in the context of encounters with foreign environments and cultures, where the distinction between unwanted noise and interesting sound marks or sound tonics can be ambiguous, especially for a stranger.

A Winter Day on Tarutao
Mirt
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The first album in a series documenting the soundscape of Tarutao Marine National Park in Thailand, one of the country's most exquisite and unspoilt regions. The park is covered with well-preserved virgin rainforest teeming with fauna including dusky langurs, crab-eating macaques, hornbills, sea eagles, and over 110 species of birds. The album presents what is likely a typical winter day on this wild island, focusing on the sounds of nature in an environment where human presence is minimal. Consisting of three main sections depicting morning, midday, and evening, interspersed with hydrophone underwater recordings, the album makes no claim to comprehensively represent the island but rather documents the author's initial encounter—a single winter day among the few experienced during this first visit to Tarutao.

Songs and Prayers from the Kathmandu Valley
Mirt
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A collection of recordings made in Nepal, in Kathmandu, Bhaktapur, Nagarkot, and Pokhara. The album explores the fluid boundary between environmental sounds and musicality, where the rhythmic turning of prayer wheels and distant wedding celebrations reverberating through city streets reveal an inherent sonic poetry. Everyday sounds—water flowing, spinning wheels crafting yarn—take on melodic qualities when heard with attentive ears. Moving between backstreet scenes and temple rituals, the recordings document how the sacred and mundane coexist in the Kathmandu Valley's soundscape, creating a natural composition where prayers, labor, and celebration form an inseparable sonic fabric of daily life.

Deer Rut Time
Katarzyna Szczerba • Andrzej Załęski • Tomek Mirt
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A compilation of deer rut recordings made by three Polish artists in different locations across Poland. Katarzyna Szczerba, a sound recordist working in film production and winner of multiple international awards, captured the evening sounds near Osiek by the Noteć River. Andrzej Załęski, musician, filmmaker, and music curator, recorded both night and daytime sessions in the primeval Białowieża Forest. Tomek Mirt contributed nocturnal recordings from the Odra River floodplains near Siekierki. The album documents this seasonal natural phenomenon from multiple perspectives and environments, capturing the haunting calls of rutting deer across Poland's diverse landscapes.

BKK
Mirt
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A sonic portrait of Bangkok created after several visits to the city, presenting 18 short recordings trying to avoid unnecessary aestheticization in favor of seeking valuable qualities in ordinary sounds. Moving through parks, markets, temples, and street scenes, the album refuses to function as either an objective guide or a postcard displaying only picturesque moments. Much of the album focuses on the extraordinary intensity and complexity of the city's sounds that in extremes resemble plunderphonic collages in themselves. The result ranges from Muay Thai training and karaoke sessions, sounds of evening exercises to street vendors, air conditioners, and temple ambiences, creating an authentic portrait of bustling Bangkok's sonic fabric.

Manieczki Soundscapes
Jacek Szczepanek / Kolektyw Terenowy
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Jacek Szczepanek, a professional field recordist, ventures into the unusual acoustic territory surrounding one of Poland's legendary provincial discos. Recorded in the early morning hours between 2:00-6:00 AM at varying distances of 50-800 meters from Klub Ekwador, the album captures the peak activity of nocturnal birds—particularly Nightingales and Great Reed Warblers—occurring precisely when the party reaches its climax. In this village of just 600 inhabitants, located 10 kilometers from the nearest town, nature's chorus and human revelry create an unintentional sonic dialogue. The recording documents this peculiar collision of biophony and anthropophony, where the ancient rituals of mating calls interweave with the bass-heavy pulse of contemporary nightlife.

Spomeniks
Bolesław Wawrzyn & Paweł Starzec
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Bolesław Wawrzyn (a field recording project by Michał Turowski) focuses on recordings of execution sites and extermination camps in Poland, this time collecting such recordings from camps in the former Yugoslavia. The album documents concentration camps including Jasenovac (often referred to as 'The Yugoslavian Auschwitz'), Jajinci, Sajmiste, and Topovske Supe, as well as the Monument to the Revolution of the People of Moslavina in Podgarić—one of the striking brutalist sculptures commissioned by Tito in the 1960s and 70s to commemorate WWII. Paweł Starzec, a photographer whose images grace the album's cover, accompanied the sonic documentation with visual testimony. Together, they capture the current reality of these memorial sites where mass atrocities occurred during WWII—places that today often stand neglected or forgotten, their symbolism lost in the aftermath of Yugoslavia's dissolution, yet still resonating with the weight of history.

Tristes Tropiques
Mirt
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Recorded in Vietnam, the album uses environmental recordings to depict a kind of internal spiritual journey, creating an imaginary soundscape not through edits or collage but by arranging and combining recordings from real places. Reality and actually visited locations merge with personal fleeting impressions and experiences, giving the whole a surreal character. The recordings often focus on unusual or unwanted acoustic phenomena such as exceptional reverberations, glitches, distortions, sometimes a layering of natural and artificial sounds in space, or those simply foreign to a traveler from another culture.

The Voice of Steelworks
Dawid Chrapla
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Dawid Chrapla's album captures the sonic character of a steelworks in Zawadzki, a town in southern Poland where the artist lives. The recordings present the acoustic environment of heavy industry with meticulous attention to detail and sonic quality, revealing the complex textures of industrial labor—the roar of furnaces, the rhythmic clanging of machinery, and the ambient hum of production. Rather than approaching the subject as an outsider, Chrapla documents a landscape that he knows well and which is significant for him also in a musical context. He transforms the distinctive voice of steel production into a portrait both industrial and intimate.

Místní rozhlas
Jacek Szczepanek
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Jacek Szczepanek documents the phenomenon of local public address systems (místní rozhlas) widespread across Czech and Slovak villages and small towns. These systems are a characteristic element of the environment, often with sounds from multiple speakers overlapping each other. The album captures announcements, music, and messages broadcast through community speaker systems, reflecting a distinctive and somewhat surrealistic aspect of the visited places.

Another Day on Tarutao
Mirt
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The second album from Tarutao Marine National Park in Thailand takes a different approach from its predecessor. Rather than following a unified concept, it functions more as a notebook—gathering the most compelling recordings from subsequent visits without the self-imposed structure of the first album. Tomek Mirt, now more conscious of his deeper relationship with the place and his desire to return, treats the project in a more relaxed way as an ongoing work in progress. The recordings present the island's sonic environment through snippets gathered during different times of day in a more chaotic manner but with greater depth and familiarity.

State of Matter
Mirt • Ter
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A collection of winter soundscapes recorded in the vicinity of Warsaw during the pandemic, a period that compelled the authors to focus on their immediate surroundings with heightened attention. Spending their first winter at home in several years, they turned their ears to the smallest sonic details characteristic of the season, discovering a desire for deeper exploration of familiar territory. The album focuses on sounds of snow, ice, and floes—the crackle of frozen surfaces, the subtle movements of ice formations, the muffled acoustics of snow-covered landscapes. These recordings are driven by reflections on climate change and the fear that these may be among the last opportunities to capture such phenomena in these locations, as winters grow milder and less predictable. The album documents the sonic qualities of winter's changing states of matter, transforming what might have been taken for granted into an archive of vanishing seasonal experiences.

Laos Street Recordings
Mirt • Ter
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The album collects recordings made in a spontaneous, observational style, capturing seemingly mundane moments across Laos—from larger cities like Luang Prabang and Vientiane to the village of Nong Khiaw. Rather than attempting to tell a cohesive, easily decipherable story, this is a collection of images, quick sketches caught on the fly: advertising loudspeakers, prayers, abandoned amusement park grounds, sounds from local eateries, the resonance of bridges and walkways. Many recordings capture a more provincial, rural character. It's a travelogue focusing on contemplation of everyday life. Listening to the album is like turning pages of a sketchbook, embracing the serendipitous and ad hoc nature of street recording rather than carefully planned sessions.

Steelworks on the Edge of the Forest
Dawid Chrapla
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David Chrapla returns with his second album collecting recordings whose main topic is steelworks. This time, the industrial sounds were recorded from a distance and were accompanied by various voices of nature. The echoing low growls and thumps of the steelworks are sometimes almost drowned out by the chorus of frogs. Other times, they dominate over the almost inaudible sounds of nature. It's an intriguing and addictive mix of contrasting elements.

Sounds of Cambodian Speakers
Mirt • Ter
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Whether it's the distant echos of local wedding sound systems or the screeching advertisements coming from mobile scooter-powered stalls, the Southeast Asian landscape is filled with the voices of myriads of loudspeakers. This collection compiles only recordings from around Battambang and Phnom Penh in Cambodia, but in many ways is universal for the entire region. The countryside, the temples, and city streets, are full of these artificial sounds generated by mobile phones, PA systems or even simple beepers. Sometimes it just adds a unique flavor to the place, as when you hear the soft sounds of local music among vast rice fields, other times it is surreal, even slightly disturbing, as in the case of bird recordings played near the silos to scare away other avians. Sometimes even in the most remote places you are accompanied by an almost inaudible distant bass throbbing of large speakers. In cities, voice messages take on a unique character, especially when they are amateur-recorded advertisements looped in toy-like megaphones. We tried to bring together all these soundscape defining elements on this album.

Ice Tectonics
John Grzinich
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Since moving to Estonia 20 years ago, I’ve become fascinated by ice. After walking on the frozen Baltic Sea and hearing loud 'voices' from a local lake one still and cold night, these experiences have transformed the way I think about frozen bodies of water. Far from solid static entities, these great frozen planes are alive and behave in ways not unlike the crust of the earth. From subtle shifts to violent eruptions the tectonic-like movements of ice can become dynamic and dramatic sonic events. But witnessing and capturing these events is far from easy. In my experience, it’s all about timing. If you don’t live next to a lake or right on the sea, strategic recording sessions are a challenge. The time of year, wind speed and direction, air temperature and pressure, water currents and salinity and moon cycles are but a few of the factors that influence the character and behaviour of ice formations. Unless one is following these factors closely and happens to live near a body of water, experiencing and capturing dramatic ice occurrences may come down to a rare chance encounter.

In the spring of 2024 I, or we, got lucky. It had been a good winter (by climate change standards), but a sudden warm spell melted the snow and eased up the rigid tension of the frozen lakes. A week of sunny days and clear cold nights sparked good conditions for the ice to shift and deform. I circulated among four lakes in my area for a week including the large lake Peipsi that forms the eastern border. Despite the conditions, it was still hit or miss with both live recording and using overnight drop rigs. The outcome of my explorations has resulted in ‘Ice Tectonics’, a collection of select recordings that reveals what a seasonal transition means for ice and the varied sounds that emerge. Despite hours of recorded material, the experiences are fleeting. Within a few weeks the ice was gone and with it the image of those stark landscapes and feelings of vulnerable isolation that one may encounter after spending hours listening to ice. - John Grzinich

Back to the Island
Mirt
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The third CD album in the Tarutao series documents the current state of a decade-long process of deepening engagement with the island's soundscape. What began in 2016 as a cautious observation of a single winter day evolved into repeated returns, each visit peeling back another layer of understanding. The recording method itself evolved with each walk along the island's roads, with much credit to overnight drop rigs capturing the environment without human presence, revealing how profoundly the soundscape changes when the observer becomes absent. Over time, the initial excitement of novelty gave way to recognition of patterns and perceiving the environment more as a holistic organism than just a set of events. The accompanying essay reflects on this gradual shift in listening: learning to balance attention between the dramatic and the subtle, accepting the limits of objectivity while trusting that repeated observation brings deeper, if never complete, understanding.

Uwu Uwu Uwu
Mirt • Ter
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If I had to point out one distinctive element of the Southeast Asia soundscape, it would be the call of the Asian Koel – a close relative of the cuckoo. It is likely that most visitors to India, Thailand, Laos or Cambodia have heard his unique call at least a few times. It is different but as outstanding as the cuckoo call. This bird can be heard as easily in remote rural areas as it is in bustling cities like Chiang Mai or Bangkok. Even with all the noise of traffic, you can hear a Koel singing a few blocks away. It is no wonder that this bird is considered the noisiest in Asia. I can imagine that it will be the last voice of nature trying to shout over the roar of the cities. This album is a tribute to this indomitable red-eyed singer. Recorded in different locations in Northern Thailand.

We have been planning this release for a long time and initially we wanted to collect also recordings made earlier in Laos and Cambodia. You will definitely find the voice of Asian Koel more than once on our previous albums. Ultimately we chose recordings made during our last where the bird plays the main role.

Amharic Manuscripts
Michał Wiśniowski
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Michał Wiśniowski's "Amharic Manuscripts" is a sonic journey through the heart of Ethiopia—from the monumental waterfalls of the Blue Nile, through the streets of Addis Ababa, to the silence of the rock-hewn temples of Lalibela. Field recording intertwines with stories of everyday life, spirituality, and rituals, where the sacred and the profane intertwine. The richness of the soundscapes captures both the majesty of nature and the intimacy of human gestures—from fieldwork to prayer. This album not only documents but also meditates on the harmony of man, God, and nature.