Soundwalk

This post originally introduced the pseudonym Crou, which I quickly abandoned, given the name already had multiple artist profiles on streaming services, and I realized a lot of people rely on voice commands to play music in the car and at home. “Crou” made that difficult. My usual approach angles don’t seem to apply here. This is something new. This is Sleeping Animal. I think I’m going to script...

I haven’t yet said this, but my intention with this and the previous three recordings was a hopscotch survey of Pacific Coast soundscapes. To recollect now, these have been Yoakam Point on the Oregon Coast, Copalis Ghost Forest on the Washington Coast, Keahou on the Big Island of Hawaii and now Preston Island in Crescent City, on the Northern California Coast. This reflection on Preston Island lea...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit chadcrouch.substack.com Just a quick refresher: My Listening Spot series features one long, stationary environmental recording with a bespoke ambient composition. Peaceful, atmospheric, ambiguous. You’re invited to press play and read on! Ah, the South Pacific. Hawaii. The Big Island. It conjures all kinds of idyllic images, sounds, and...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit chadcrouch.substack.com I want to tell you a ghost story. But, first a music story. In the music industry the story of an album is told in a “one sheet”. Typically a few paragraphs in length, the one sheet explains the outlines of album personnel, timeline, context, and often place, but not always. There are tropes of course, as it is w...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit chadcrouch.substack.com Nothing like a trip to the ocean to start a new year! I feel so fortunate to live just over an hour away from one of the most beautiful coastlines on this planet. This recording was made at Yoakam Point, near Coos Bay Oregon, about 4 hours down the coast. It’s a uniquely beautiful sounding surf here, I have to sa...

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, Por...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit chadcrouch.substack.com Welcome back. Let’s finish our stroll along the Columbia and find out more about this intriguing place. In the first installment we learned how Warrior Point got its name, and about and the rock formation that became the geological cornerstone of Sauvie Island. In this conclusion we arrive at Warrior Rock Lightho...

The Warrior Point Trail is a 7 mile out-and-back stroll on a dirt lane along the bank of the Columbia River among cottonwood forests, grassy meadows, and several lakes. The lakes are never really in clear view, but in the winter you are aware of them, being the preferred locales of sometimes raucous Tundra Swans. I started off walking along the water, joining the proper trail the better part of a...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit chadcrouch.substack.com 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, an...

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. I...

This week we are crossing the river from Sauvie Island in Oregon to Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge (NWR) in Washington state. The Northern tip of the island is directly across from where we are walking today: on recently restored trail in the refuge known as the Oaks to Wetland Trail. In 2019 hundreds of Douglas Fir trees were felled and removed from this area to encourage “oak release”. An o...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit chadcrouch.substack.com 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 trai...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit chadcrouch.substack.com 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 d...

Rentenaar Road is just a flood-prone, gravel road through blackberry briars on the east side the Sauvie Island Wildlife Area. It does not look particularly special or inviting. But it is. It’s a portal to the kingdom of birds that have come to this island every winter for time immemorial. And, unless you’re there to hunt, it’s as close as you can get to the large flocks of Snow Geese, Canada Geese...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit chadcrouch.substack.com We’re back on Sauvie Island for a special bonus soundwalk. Or maybe it’s a sound wade . Feel free to play the audio as you read on. A satellite view of Sauvie Island reveals a squiggly teardrop-shape island about the size of Manhattan. The upper half of that teardrop has an assemblage of lakes that resembles a he...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit chadcrouch.substack.com Wapato Park is pretty great, partially because it’s easily overlooked and therefore never crowded. Its full name is Wapato Access Greenway State Park . It’s a sleeper park, the kind you stumble on if you like studying maps. The small gravel parking lot trailhead is on a dead end road, and easy to miss. Interestin...

In early 2022, before I adopted the soundwalk form for a my own musical inquiry, I released a recording called Rain Suite . It featured one long field recording— not captured while walking—with a group of self-contained instrumental movements of varying character in the same key. This is the definition of “suite” in music. It was very much a R&D precursor to my soundwalks. Indeed, it inspired my t...

It’s Oct 2nd as I write. The Oak Island area on Sauvie Island, near Portland, Or., closed to recreational use for the season yesterday. For the coming fall and winter, it will serve as a haven for the birds, save for the occasional hunters. Last winter, when I brought my Soundwalk podcast to Substack, I embarked on a series touching down at certain points in the greater area I referred to as the C...

And now we return to our soundwalk series on quiet spots in the city . This is part two of two. But before we get to that, I’d just like to take a minute to reflect on my journey to get here. On April 29, 2022 I released Chapman Beach Soundwalk . It was both extremely simple and, to me, experimental. It was, in a nutshell, a natural soundscape with musical soundtrack. I had no basis to believe tha...

Welcome back. It’s a new season of Soundwalk, the album series / podcast / newsletter that transports you to sound-rich natural places via roving binaural audio field recordings paired to a melodic, ambient score. In this short two-part season we are discovering serene soundscapes within the city of Portland, Oregon. Thank you for tuning in! See that dark green canyon in the foreground? That’s whe...

Read: Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3 , Part 4 . When I turned twenty-one in 1994, I embarked on a 500 mile solo hike on the Pacific Crest Trail across the state of Washington.   The Tread of My Soul is a memoir-meets-travelogue written from the trail.  Originally self published and shared with only a handful of family and friends, I recently dusted off the manuscript with the intention of sharing it wit...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit chadcrouch.substack.com For our last soundwalk we are returning to the banks of Onion Creek, taking in McKinney Falls and its environs. It’s been a whirlwind four stop soundwalk tour of greater Austin, TX. Spring mornings in this part of the country are hard to beat! McKinney Falls lies within a 641 acre state park where Onion Creek plu...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit chadcrouch.substack.com We have decamped from the inner rings of Austin to the suburb of Round Rock, TX. It’s April 7th, 2023. When I’m scouting a map for a good place to record a soundwalk, I look for trails through natural areas that have some sort of buffer in the way topography or distance from highways and arterial roads. In Round...

We are in Austin, TX again, at Onion Creek Metropolitan Park on a mild spring morning. It’s April 5, 2024. Onion Creek Greenway Trail follows a large “S” curve along Onion Creek on the semi-suburban south side of Austin, Texas. Located about two miles from the closest strand of Austin’s web of highways, it is one of the more serene riparian destinations within the city limits. It’s a popular place...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit chadcrouch.substack.com I couldn’t really do what I set out to do yesterday. It was too hot in the city, so I went for an afternoon walk in Forest Park. I was interested to hear what it sounded like when the thermometer hit triple digits; something it rarely used to do around here. It was quiet. Did I say it was hot ? Instinctively I wa...