Last year, around this time, I travelled to Durham, NC for a record label conference. The city reminded me of Eugene, OR, where I went to school for a short time. Both are university towns. Durham has a bigger population, and is just one node of a much larger urban area, but the downtown cores are similarly compact, pedestrian-friendly, and relatively quiet.

My mission at the conference was to figure out how to grow my business and innovate my way toward prosperity. A tall order. Given that my business model is hyper-niche—capturing environmental recordings and creating instrumental musical suites—I was sifting ideas and prospects, feeling good about taking time to reflect and plan.

As I walked to an evening event downtown, I was taken in by the sound of crickets in a sparsely filled surface parking lot. We have crickets in Oregon, of course, but perhaps not as many in our cities. The sound was both familiar and novel. I had my Sennheiser binaural headset in my pocket, and decided to capture the moment. From there I took a meandering walk into the heart of the city. This is one of my first urban soundwalks in the US—something that had long occurred to me to do, but never seemed particularly promising, aesthetically or commercially.

But, as I was feeling sensory excitement that comes with being in a new place, I reasoned it was high time to experiment. I let my ears lead the way.

There are urban sounds throughout the recording, but they largely seem confined to the auditory horizon. The near field sound of the city is so quiet it could almost read as pastoral. As I padded into the downtown blocks, a fountain in the plaza of the Durham Convention Center beckoned me toward it. Felling open to it, the shimmering sound put me in a kind of audio trance. I just stood there for several minutes—long enough to become self-conscious—figuring passersby might take me for a tweaker staring at the ground. I took a photo of the sidewalk to memorialize the moment.

I felt a peace wash over me there, surrounded by people, cars, trains, energy, life. It was all very ordinary, but as I stood listening, I began to sense the extraordinary qualities of it too. I know that might sound hokey, but it’s true. I tried to convey that feeling in the score. Maybe it will translate, listening to it? That’s the hope, anyways.

Once again, thanks for reading along and listening. Durham Night Soundwalk is available on all music streaming services September 18, 2026.

What is the hike up to Burnt Lake without the greyed spectral snags of ancient old growth, killed, but not entirely destroyed, by fire? Would it be like walking through a graveyard with no gravestones?

The stand of trees along the trail is uniform, almost homogenous. A mix of hemlock and Douglas-fir.

Scattered among these conifer poles are columns, smoothed and greyed, sometimes hollowed out. They can measure four times as large in diameter.

These are the markers of the great fire that gave Burnt Lake its name.

The forest fire of 1904 started from a homesteader burning slash near what is now Rhododendron, on Aug 25th of that year. Dense smoke engulfed the slopes, reportedly blanketing Government Camp so heavily that visibility dropped to under half a mile. Another fire in 1906 burned off what the first one didn’t consume.

On my way up I stopped at locations that struck my interest, both visually and sonically. Due to technical difficulties with my ancient iPad, however, I only made three sketches on this outing. The first was where a spring rivulet meandered with the trail:

When I arrived at the lake, the mountain was obscured by clouds.

The clouds were moving; shredding, scattering, opening, closing. The effect was tantalizing, revealing glimpses of Mount Hood, a looming sentinel across the valley at 11,250 ft tall.

Burnt Lake is a glacial tern. As alpine glaciers expanded from the crest of Zigzag Mountain in the Pleistocene, ice carved out a steep-walled cirque amphitheater beneath East Zigzag Mountain. The lake basin is scooped directly out of volcanic rock. Morainal deposits impound the water, allowing snowmelt and spring water to pool into the basin.

The clouds brought rain; short bursts of precipitation playing the placid lake surface and leafy margins like a chorus of little drums. I sat on a log absorbing it all, sketching the scene on my iPad. While my second attempt adorns the cover at the top, my first quick study looked like this:

Thanks for reading along and listening. Burnt Lake is available on all music streaming services Sept 4, 2026.

Today we are visiting Holland Park in west central London.

But before we do, let’s zoom out. If you look at a map of central London you’ll see, within the spiderweb of roadways fanning out from the Thames, hundreds of small green rectilinear plots.

Where I live, on the west coast of the United States, this symbology tends to translate as parks or open spaces, accessible to the public. Not so in London. The majority of these smaller bits of green are private parks; fenced, gated and surrounded by tall hedges. You need a key to get in.

Thankfully the much larger green spaces, including the Royal Parks, are open to the public. The Royal Parks trace back to Henry VIII seizing land for royal deer hunting. In Hyde Park, Kensington Gardens, Regent's Park, and five others you’ll find a mix of woodlands and meadows, where Londoners now gather to commune with the naturalistic landscape in genuinely massive numbers.

Holland Park is something of an outlier in this mix. The 54 acre site dates back to the 1600’s as the private gardens of Cope Castle, a mansion originally built on a 500 acre estate for Sir Walter Cope. The Youngest of Cope's daughters married Henry Rich, who became the 1st Earl of Holland in 1624, giving the house, and eventually the park, its name. Much of Holland House was destroyed in Blitz bombing raids. An Act of Parliament in 1953 finalized the sale of the estate to the government, with part of the grounds opened to the public that year.

Holland Park feels smaller and more intimate than its acreage suggests. It’s quiet. Its few discrete entrances contribute to this feeling of privacy and intimacy. It’s also compartmentalized. It’s rigidly formal in the Dutch Garden;

While woodlands sprawl on the north side;

And a unique blend of the two near can be found near the center, in the Kyoto Garden:

And so, it does not sound like the Royal Parks. There are far less visitors, more wildlife density, and less traffic noise from boulevards on the margins. To put it plainly, it’s my kind of city park.

For my soundwalk score, I sought to capture the relaxed and hushed feel of the park in musical movements using electric piano, synthesizers, tuned percussion, electric bass, and woodwinds.

Thanks for reading along and listening. Holland Park Soundwalk is available on all music streaming services August 21st, 2026.

Author’s Note: I mixed up my dates, so this post arrived one week early. My new release for this week is Amsterdam Dusk, available under the artist name Listening Spot, on all streaming platforms today, Friday, August 14th.