Hello. It’s 2025. How can that be? I look at the number and think, that’s a futuristic number. Wasn’t the future supposed to be easier? Something tells me 2025 will not be easy. Still, I’m determined to meet it with can-do attitude.

For now though, let’s ease into it. With that it mind I chose this recording, Forest Stream Suite. The environmental sound was captured last June in Forest Park, Portland, Oregon; a place we’ll be revisiting throughout the coming year.

Many of the seasonal streams were, by that time, down to a trickle. The percussive sound at the top of the recording is one such a trickle, a thread of water falling over a stone, as captured by a homemade hydrophone.

The hydrophone is a simple design incorporating a ~$1 bulk-supply 27mm contact mic, a kombucha bottle screw cap, a coin (for ballast), a 1/8th inch stereo cord, a swatch of duct tape, and a couple dips in liquid plastic. I was instructed in the ways of DIY contact mic wizardry by the gifted sound artist Marcus Fischer at a workshop hosted by Oregon Contemporary about a month prior. Thanks Marcus and PICA!

Hydrophone recording is something I hope to do more of in the coming year. Maybe I’ll invest in something a little more sensitive. Or possibly a stereo pair?

The instrumentation follows the pattern of previous Listening Spot releases: One continuous field recording and several distinct musical movements in the same key. With the hydrophone click track as a jumping-off point, this one is reaches out its sound tentacles in new directions, without letting go of the familiar.

There’s some of my favorite wildlife belting it out here: American Robin, Pacific Wren, Wilson’s Warbler, Yellow Warbler… While listening, I can picture the dappled light of the forest.

Thanks for tuning in. I’m grateful for your interest. Forest Stream Suite is available under the artist name Listening Spot on all streaming platforms (Spotify, Apple, Tidal, Amazon, YouTube…) Friday, January 3rd. I hope you can spend some quiet time with it.

Lastly, I took some time to write some reflections on my first year of being on Substack a couple days ago. I didn’t send it out as a newsletter, because it was mostly written as an exercise to clarify some things for myself. I’m mentioning it here for those who may be curious about the platform, my impressions as a musician, and some intentions in 2025. Happy New Year!

Time now for Listening Spot. This is the third effort filed under the self-describing pseudonym, with the recipe being a long field recording accompanied by a number of musical movements comprising a greater whole. Put simply, it’s just meant to be more dreamy.

For this outing we have left the Columbia River, and the Wapato Valley (aka Portland Basin), where we have settled in for a few months. (But barely, we’re not officially done here. There’s two more installments over the next two weeks.) Oaks Bottom is a mixed wetland on the Willamette River in Portland, about 10 river miles from the Columbia confluence, and the southern edge of Wapato Valley. In some ways it approximates what the Columbia shorelines would have looked like 100 years ago: marshy wonderlands where cottonwood trees thrive.

Oaks Bottom was my go-to destination for many years. I became quite familiar with the soundscape over time. I can usually identify the wildlife there by ear. If listening back to a recording I can tell you what season it was made, down to the month. My favorite season: Spring. It’s the best.

In this recording we hear the Black-headed Grosbeak. Instantly, that places it in the likely realm of May or June.

The sound of the cottonwood trees is another hint. In May, the leaves are young and pliant. By June they are big and broad, clattering in the breezes. Here is an excellent video on the sound of Cottonwood leaves.

Even in winter cottonwood leaves continue have their own sound—underfoot. Where other leaves—maples for example—now have the consistency of tissue paper on the moist ground, cottonwoods scrape against each other like coated cardstock valentines. Scrunch, scrunch. Scriff, skrich.

I think that’s it for this one. Cottonwoods Suite is available on all streaming platforms (Spotify, Apple, Tidal, Amazon, YouTube…) Friday, December 6th. I hope you can spend some quiet time with it.

I’m trying something new: a short-form twist on my soundwalk formula, folding in my photography. So here is a pilot episode of sorts. I hope you enjoy this little string of impressions in sound and vision.

Go on and hit that play button above. Let’s see what we can see, and hear what we can hear.

It’s a densely overcast morning. As soon as I hit the trail, I’m checking out a Townsend’s Chipmunk. It’s smaller than my hand, munching on a seed, I think. Do you hear the click-click-click-click? That’s my camera. That’s the sound it makes when I want to take pictures in low light without a tripod. It takes multiple shots and stitches them together. The chipmunk is still, and then poof it’s gone.

It rained all night long. The trees are saturated and dripping.

Little streams and rivulets course down the upper reaches of Balch Creek Canyon. I love listing to their ephemeral burble. Across the canyon, the tops of Douglas-fir emerge from the mist. The hillside is breathing.

I’ve been on a mushroom kick, so I’m scanning the stumps and nurse logs on the side of the trail. I see a slug munching on fungi. A petit dejeuner.

I hear Golden-crowned kinglets up in the canopy, and a Pacific Wren chipping over the rise.

I’ve come back down to the Wildwood Trail. It’s an easy stroll here as it rounds the contour of the Tualatin mountains above the upper reaches of these NW Portland neighborhoods built out in the early 1900s. The din of highway 30 and the NW industrial park washes up these slopes. The train whistles are ghostly, bouncing off the fir colonnades. Look, rays of sunlight are breaking through.

On one of these firs I spy Fairy Parachutes (Marasmiellus candidus) nestled in the saturated moss. I can’t think of a more perfect, evocative name for these. The diameters of these are less than a dime’s. These are the only ones I find today.

On a nearby stump I see a similarly very delicate duo. Like so many, I can’t identify it. Do you know?

Around the corner I spy a coral fungus (Clavulina coralloides). It’s about two inches tall. Not big. I set my camera down in the duff to capture this angle, and it appears bigger. Click-click-click-click.

I’ve been hearing Red-breasted Nuthatches up high in the canopy. Their calls sounds like little clown shoes on parade to me. Honk honk honk. The only bird that I attempt to photograph, other than some Dark-eyed Juncos is this Brown Creeper.

Brown Creepers always climb up tree trunks, and they are very on task, so you’ll often get good looks at them in the forest. What does it have in its beak?

Brown Creepers have one of the sweetest songs. Trees, trees, beautiful trees they sing in a pitch so high that many a septuagenarian (age 70+) can no longer hear them. With that in mind, I try to savor their singing when it’s quiet.

On the north side of the rise, I now see the firs and ferns backlit by the rays of sun breaking through. They glisten with a million raindrops clinging to them, like so many berries.

This purple capped mushroom on the side of the trail is coated with bits of soil from the barrage of the morning rain. It stretches out above the fir cones like a battle-worn survivor.

Nearby I find this scene and try to puzzle out a scenario from the forensic evidence. I don’t get far, but the words “string cheese incident" pop into my head, and I visualize a squirrel.

One thing that quickly becomes clear about fungi photography is the extent to which it’s difficult to communicate scale. These are miniscule, testing the limits of my camera.

I identify them as belonging to the large Mycena genus, commonly known as bonnets. Wikipedia says:

Mycenas are hard to identify to species and some are distinguishable only by microscopic features such as the shape of the cystidia. Some species are edible, while others contain toxins, but the edibility of most is not known, as they are likely too small to be useful in cooking.

and..

Over 58 species are known to be bioluminescent, creating a glow known as foxfire.

I wonder if these guys glow?

As I work my way back, I’m struck by how everything looks a little different with the sun being a few degrees higher on the horizon. Late-morning light. Time to head home.

Today we have a bit of a departure. This 31 minute soundwalk was recorded at Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge on January 28th, 2024. It is the flipside—both figuratively and literally—to the upcoming Oaks to Wetland Trail Soundwalk. I’m calling it Four Trains Soundwalk.

Stretches of quiet and stretches of train noise were intertwined in my lived experience, but as always, effectuating a pre-industrial soundscape requires substantial editing in the way of splices and EQ. Rather than let these appealing train recordings become so much digital ash, I’ve compiled them here. Visually speaking, this is what that looks like. The spectrograms below are basically just heat maps for sound. The first image is the natural soundscape—the birds, the creek, and the rain. The second is the four trains. (Not preserved is any aircraft noise.)

Think of this as a trainspotting album. Trainlistening? It’s really quite a treat to have just trains, wildlife and rain sounds. The low frequency hums, the clank-clank, the doppler effects, and the periodic pneumatic “psst” sounds are quite relaxing. The wildlife, creek, and rain sounds soften the industrial edges. It’s a top 3 insomnia / get-to-sleep album for me over the past several months. I’m happy to share it with you finally.

For my instrumental score, I leaned heavily into textural synth drones mirroring the energy of the passing trains.

I hope you enjoy it!

I love oak trees. Here in the Pacific Northwest, our western forests are dominated by conifers, so oaks have something of an exotic look to my eye. It wasn’t always this way.

Here in the Willamette Valley, oaks thrived in the rain shadow of the Coast Range. The entire 1.5 million hectare valley was not long ago dominated by native prairies and oak savannas.

This is one of the most strongly human-modified ecoregions on the continent, with an estimated 99.5% decline of native prairies and oak savannas. Despite this devastating loss, the vegetation of this region and its history are fascinating, and the remaining remnants are often packed with rare and endemic species. (oneearth.org)

In the last 175 years we have lost 98% of the oak savanna habitat here.

(From: Rivers to Ridges Oak Habitat Flyer)

It’s not lost on me that, just a 30 minute trip from my home, a 100 acre oak savanna on Sauvie Island is a pretty special place. Not just because it’s scarce habitat, but also because it’s very tranquil, buffered from road and city noise by placid lakes and distance. So we’re back, visiting Oak Island, the “island” within an island:

This time I pointed my most sensitive mics (a Rode NT-1 stereo pair in ORTF placement) toward the long axis of the woodland, recording a detailed, spacious soundscape. One can walk around the margins of this woodland on the Oak Island Nature Trail, but there are actually no trails through it. It really preserves a sense of mystery about it, I have to say. You are an outsider looking in, here.

Oak Savanna Suite is the second in a new series of more calm, more atmospheric, more classically ambient releases collected under the pseudonym artist name Listening Spot.

As with the first release, Crane Lake Suite, Oak Savanna Suite is a group of self-contained instrumental movements of varying character in the same key. The instrumentation sounds vaguely orchestral, like a pastorale with flowing legato phrasing, but it’s less melodically rigid, and not built up with traditional orchestral instrument sounds.

In fact, in the beginning it’s difficult to discern basic musical patterns: Meter is elastic, melodic phrases are indistinct and unrepeated, and the music barely rises above the soundscape. All this changes by degrees as the suite progresses. I hope you get to spend some quality time with it.

If you enjoy it, please follow Listening Spot wherever you get your music, and consider sharing it with one other person. I’m heartened by the initial response, but also aware of the challenge of building momentum for a new thing, so I’m grateful for any support you can offer.

Oak Savanna Suite is available on all streaming platforms (Spotify, Apple, Tidal, Amazon, YouTube…) tomorrow, Friday, November 8th.