This soundwalk concludes a short series from the Redwood Coast of Northern California, including the Substack-only Fern Canyon Soundwalk, as well as Grove of the Titans Soundwalk and Preston Island Soundwalk.

Brown Creek Trail was the clear winner on the Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park trail map for soundwalkin’. It runs parallel to the busy scenic parkway, with a ridge rising up between the two, acting and sound baffling. It’s probably one of the quieter options in the park. The creek adds to the relaxed atmosphere, and draws in the birds. I loved this hike.

I’m going to drop this Steinbeck quote again, because I think it bears repeating:

"The redwoods, once seen, leave a mark or create a vision that stays with you always. No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree. The feeling they produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe. It's not only their unbelievable stature, nor the color which seems to shift and vary under your eyes, no, they are not like any trees we know, they are ambassadors from another time." - John Steinbeck

It’s so true. I actually took more videos than photos on this hike. (The quote applies to video too. you can’t successfully make a video of a redwood tree.) I captured short clips out of habit, thinking they would lend themselves to Spotify “Clip” content. I used to do this for a while; add little video clips to all my tracks, just on that platform. It was tedious, but I rationalized it was a nice portal into visual world of the soundwalk, and I thought it maybe it would put me in the good graces of the algorithm. It didn’t seem to move the needle in that regard.

Then I started questioning how it changed a listener’s relationship to the music, seeing an <8 second video loop over and over. Further, I noticed the user interface incentivized interaction with these clips, with an animated rectangle at the top of an album track list.

For me, because the tracks are invariably longer than the video clips, it just made feel less relaxed, and more aware of the skip button. This is not what I wanted to facilitate, so I don’t do it anymore.

So, no videos in this post either. Same reason. I want to facilitate settling in. Closing eyes. Letting the mind wander. Basking in the sound, not the pixels.

I was with my family on this walk, lagging behind just out of earshot much of the time. This was a “working vacation”, while out on some quiet trails.

There is a short spur loop trail in the middle of this valley, leading visitors by many outsized redwoods, named after founding fathers of American forestry. And I thought it was just birds that were given honorific names. Generally speaking I’m not in favor of naming birds and trees after people, but I’ll go along with the quote on the plaque at the entrance: Forestry is a good thing but love is better.

Speaking of loops, we went for the loop hike option which added some elevation gain on the South Fork Trail. Soon we were seeing the trees from a different point of view.

I read a trail user’s review that resonated with me. “This trail could be called ‘The Circle of Life trail’. Everywhere there is death of the forest but new life growing from it,” she wrote. It’s astounding how regenerative these ecosystems are.

The music is about what you might expect from me. The tempo is slow and measured. Arrangements are minimal; a string of duets for the most part. There are some droney passages. I like this one. It’s my hope it can be of some use to you. Thanks for listening and reading along with me here!

Redwood Soundwalk is available on all music streaming services today, May 2nd.

Decay is a natural process. It breaks down structures, so that new ones can form. Decay is also the attenuation of a sound over time.

Bearing this in mind, it is also the name of a new work I’m pleased to share with you, from my strictly instrumental project, Sleeping Animal.

Here I step away from his my field recording gear in an effort to evoke nature with instruments alone. Electric piano holds the center, while a blurred mix of synthesizers, vocals and ambient strings fill out the mix. The composition unfurls, loosening and coalescing many times over its short runtime of 14 minutes. Is it an album or an EP? What is a song, really? I sometimes ask myself. Maybe I’m just at a point in my life where the song as a structure is both less appealing and penetrating as it once was, on both the listening and composing side. Decay is tenuous and exploratory; a string of impressions, a meandering of attention akin to what one feels when walking along a trail. No verse, chorus, bridge here. It’s more about flow and sequence. I’m interested in mirroring structures in nature, inscrutable at the glance, but held in exquisite tension.

Decay by Sleeping Animal is available on all music streaming platforms today, Friday, April 25th.

Thank you for you for listening and reading. If something brings you enjoyment, please share my work with one other person. Word-of-mouth is fundamental to my ability to persevere.

The monochrome cover art photo was taken while hiking the Wildwood Trail recently, which played an important role in refining aesthetic decisions for Sleeping Animal releases, both musically and visually. This post goes into that.

And we’re back! More spring rain; more Pacific Wren and Wilson’s Warbler duets … It’s Forest Park Rain Suite II.

And now you might be thinking why split it up? Honestly I don’t entirely remember my reasoning, but the main thing that I noticed for some of my work is that once you get to the 40 minute mark, it has a pretty strong sedative effect. That’s not a bad thing, necessarily. But I’d like to think my music could be of service to those who want to lean in, as well as lean back.

I do quality control listening of my mixes with headphones at night lying in bed. I rarely make it to 40 minutes without falling asleep. So this “halfsies” presentation offers a good old fashioned intermission.

Thanks again for reading and listening along. I’m grateful for your interest. Forest Park Rain Suite II is available under the artist name Listening Spot on all streaming platforms Friday, April 18th.

Next week, the first of a series of Sound and Vision posts on the Wildwood Trail, and new work from my instrumental project Sleeping Animal!

Soundwalk is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The environmental recording for Forest Park Rain suite was recorded about a year ago on the quiet northern side of Forest Park, here in Portland Oregon.

It was a rainy day interspersed with sun breaks. Many migratory birds had buy then taken up residence here. Among them, Black-headed Grosbeak, Wilson’s Warbler, Black-throated Gray Warbler, and Hammond’s Flycatcher. Deer can also be heard moving among downed branches.

I love the acoustics of the forest slope where this was captured. I love the soft rain sounds.

Like all Listening Spot compositions, this one leans into atmospherics and emphasizes melody. Loping, synthesizer phrases are layered with vibrato synth pads and various soft, shimmering sounds.

I’ve spoken a little bit about Forest Park in the past, but I've spent some time reacquainting myself with its trails over the last month. In particular, the 30-mile-long Wildwood trail that traverses the park from north to south. In the Spring of 1999 I hiked the entire trail (slightly shorter, then) in one day. A quarter century later I had the urge to complete it again, but not all at once, I’ll be sharing the fruits of that soon!

Til then, thanks again for your interest; for reading and listening along. I’m grateful for you. Forest Park Rain Suite is available under the artist name Listening Spot on all streaming platforms Friday, April 11th.

Forest Park Rain Suite II will land next Friday, April 18th.

Fern Canyon is enchanting.

My whole raison d’être with soundwalks is to bottle up that feeling. Enchantment. Fascination. Magnetism. These are the robust feelings that pictures and sounds alone often can’t quite stir up. I see music as the key.

The great thing about music, I believe, is you don’t have to be an expert. You don’t have to know music theory, and you don’t even have to know how to play an instrument better than, say, an eager first-year student. For me, making music is about opening up, being sensitive, exploring.

Sharing music can be more fraught. A little over a year ago, I decided to make a home here on Substack. At first, it felt like play; an adventure in publishing. It still does. But, there is some tension with the commerce part. Honestly I feel like I’m floundering with that part of being a Substack author. It’s not that I don’t like it. I’m on board with writers and artists monetizing their work. From my point of view, it’s just challenging to sustain that sense of play, while trying to casually sell some part of it.

Today, I’m trying something new, to keep the exploratory vibe alive. Fern Canyon Soundwalk is only available here. Not Spotify, not Bandcamp. Not Qobuz—I like Qobuz by the way. Just here, and in its entirety, just for paid subscribers. It’s a little slice of enchantment, and practically speaking, it’s hidden. It’s if you know, you know. You know? I’m not fancy. Subscriptions start at less than $3/mo.

I don’t know if I’ll get any “conversions” from this post; any new paid subscribers. I decided not to let keep me from trying though. It’s probable that I’m making the wrong decision in terms of “exploiting” my work—It seems to me I’d earn more on streaming platforms over time. That’s okay. I’ve always felt better about my place in the economy when I’m not fretting and optimizing.

Fern Canyon is in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, in Humboldt County California. It was formed by Home Creek.

This modest stream has over the eons carved a 50 to 80 foot deep canyon through the rich sedimentary soils. The canyon walls sprout an amazing variety of luxuriant ferns and other moisture-loving plants. (vistredwoods.com)

Composing and finalizing Fern Canyon Soundwalk had many twists and turns. In the end, I went for soft, supple, simple. It’s a very tender and naive composition, grounded in felted piano, with chimes and sparkly synths punctuating the arrangement, alongside a myriad of water sounds and sparse birdsong.

I usually end with a thank you for your interest. It’s not performative. I really mean it. That’s all I’m after here…to tell stories with sounds, music, images and words. Folks taking an interest keeps me going. Thank you all!

Soundwalk is a reader-supported publication. To be one of a handful of people to hear Fern Canyon Soundwalk in its entirety, consider becoming a subscriber.

Hello. Just wanted to let you know about my new 8 minute piece in 10 movements, Woods.

A few weeks ago I released a similar instrumental work entitled Coots, mentioning it was the first in a series released under the pseudonym “Crou”. It immediately felt like a mistake.

Not the music. (For someone who has never felt particularly self-confident as a musician, that was not the problem. I felt good about the music.) The problem was there was another artist going by Crou already, and though I professed the ambiguity of pronunciation appealed to me, I soon reasoned how it would not appeal to the likes of Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant in voice commands. Abort, abort, I thought on release day.

So goodby Crou, we hardly knew ya. Hello Sleeping Animal.

I like the new name. It’s been switched for the Coots release for over a week now, and it’s felt steady as she goes. It is one of ten releases I’ve served up to my distributor with release dates fanning out to September, so the name is pretty much set now. There’s plenty more Sleeping Animal to come!

Why Sleeping Animal? To me, the name has a warm, tender, and vulnerable connotation. It also doesn’t hurt that, as an artist who has to devoted himself to environmental and wildlife recording for the past five years, the name functionally alludes to not containing wildlife sounds. That appeals to me.

Starting from square one is always a hand-wringing affair, so if you enjoy it, do me a favor and tell one person about it. In an implacable algorithmic world, word-of-mouth is real.

Woods follows in the footsteps of Coots. Not having an environmental sound bed opens up space for a sonic nuance that I’ve been enjoying experimenting with.

And spoiler alert: The die is cast on monochrome cover art. I have another fun project to announce shortly that this aesthetic plays a big role in. Anyway, I’d be delighted if you gave Woods a listen.

The sophomore release Woods by Sleeping Animal is available on all music streaming sites (Spotify, Apple, Amazon, Tidal, Qobuz etc.) today, Friday, March 28th.

Malheur means “misfortune”. It comes from French-Canadian trappers who applied the name to the SE Oregon area, when in 1818, a cache of beaver furs was believed to be stolen by local indigenous people. Malheur River, Malheur County and Malheur National Wildlife Refuge all take their names from this origin story.

Malheur National Wildlife Refuge is a wonder. Its main geologic feature is the basin lake: Malheur Lake. It’s similar in one way to The Great Salt Lake, a closed basin lake, but Malheur is technically an intermittent basin lake. In wetter years the water flows outward and onward from the lake. This prevents salts from building up, keeping it a fresh water habitat. For this reason, and because is surrounded by arid lands, it is a migratory bird haven.

The refuge was created in 1908, partly in response to the wholesale slaughter of egrets and herons for their plume feathers, which were used as ornamentation on women’s hats of the time. Eventually the reserve grew to 293 square miles in size. It’s a beautiful, quiet country. Sagebrush uplands surround the lake and riparian habitats.

It really is something to realize that when you boil it down, the Euro-American expansion in to western North America was hastened by hat fashion. Before gold, there were beavers, herons and egrets. That’s where the easy money was. Showy hats with little practical value. Beaver hides were felted and often dyed black for bowler, fedora and top hats.

Today, in wet years high numbers of nesting colonial birds, including White-faced Ibis, can be found here. I associate Florida and the gulf coast with ibises, not Oregon. Observing these birds here feels novel to me. Ibis can be heard in this recording, on the wing, ranging by.

There’s all kinds of shorebirds too, on the shorelines and mudflats.

The melodious Western Meadowlark, welcomes in the day.

As for Malheur, it’s arguably a word more apropos to the fate of the Native Americans than the trappers and settlers. In the winter of 2016 a different kind of malheur—misfortune— played out, but we’ll save that for Part 2, next week.

The environmental audio was recorded from the sagebrush uplands pointed towards the vast shallow lake wetlands. This soundstage was truly large; on the order of 1000 acres across the auditory horizon.

The instrumentation is familiar for a Listening Spot recording. (This is 7th such effort.) String-like sounds with slow attack and decay rise and fall in movements. Among the more novel sounds are undulations; gently percolating guitar voices and fuzzy textures. It gets very quiet and sparse at the 19 minute mark (Track 9) near the end. A Whimbrel can be heard in the distance, while high thin tones punctuate the ambience in a plaintive sort of way. It seems like the quietest moments are usually my favorites. I hope you’ll check it out.

Thanks for reading and listening. I’m grateful for you. Malheur Suite I is available under the artist name Listening Spot on all streaming platforms (Spotify, Apple, Tidal, Amazon, YouTube…) Friday, March 14th.