Soundwalk

Out today under my instrumental Sleeping Animal pseudonym is a composition entitled Stream . It’s a measured and minimal eleven minute miniature suite for electric piano and synthesizers. Look for Stream today, July 25, 2025 on all streaming services . I’m over half way through the release schedule of Sleeping Animal releases that took shape pretty quickly at the beginning of this year. My hope wa...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit chadcrouch.substack.com The Columbia River basin is roughly the size of France. The Columbia is the fourth-largest river in the United States by flow, and the largest river emptying into the eastern Pacific Ocean. In the last 90 years, this mighty river has been mightily renovated. The multitude of dams (around 150) in the basin now rep...

The environmental recording for Oak Island Rain Soundwalk was recorded April 30th 2024. It’s a really gentle soundscape; dewy and hushed. I chose this photo for the cover because, if you look closely, it captures the fine rain drops that fell that morning. It’s hard to take a picture of rain. I got lucky here. I’ve gave Oak Island quite a bit of attention last year, initially surveying the soundsc...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit chadcrouch.substack.com More than once in recent conversations I’ve revealed I’m not all that fond of Summer. The response has been interesting: incredulous laughter; a bemused disbelief. Why? Explain , they seemed to say. Maybe you recall the sleeper hit “ Heatwaves ” by Glass Animals that was ubiquitous in the Summer of 2022? There’s...

I’ve been doing soundwalks for three years now, but it feels like longer. Crane Lake Soundwalk is officially #64. I remember the day my dad told me he listened to The Beatles’ “When I’m Sixty-Four” on the morning of his 64th birthday. He expressed a certain disbelief that he caught up to the song he first encountered as a twenty-year-old. He didn’t feel sixty-four, he said. I even remember the day...

This is who we hear at the top of our soundwalk: The Black-headed Grosbeak. They say it sounds like an operatic American Robin. I can’t say I disagree. Its phrases rise and fall with ebullient fluidity. This week we are back in Forest Park, in my hometown, Portland, Oregon. It’s the subject of a multifaceted series that is spooling out across all my music pseudonyms throughout the year, and probab...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit chadcrouch.substack.com Renewal Sometimes my brain wakes up before my body wants to these days. And sometimes, when this occurs, I reach for my earbuds to feed my brain a gentle signal while my body transitions from asleep to awake. A couple days ago, when this happened, I instinctively decided to cue up the oldest, least recognizable o...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit chadcrouch.substack.com I’ve been doing a lot of writing about Forest Park, here in Portland, Oregon, so I decided not to double up this week. In fact, I’m putting a pause on the Wildwood Trail Sound & Vision series, to pick it back up later this year, when the photos I took match the season better. The environmental audio for today’s r...

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

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...

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

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 a...

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

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

Last week I alluded to Malheur—a French word which translates as “misfortune”—having a kind of name-place irony, back in 2016. It was national news. Maybe you recall? But, before I go further I want to take a moment to say that telling this story makes me a bit uncomfortable. On the surface it has little to do with the sound of Malheur, with music, with a connection to nature. And, because it invo...

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

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit chadcrouch.substack.com For our next series we are going to be exploring various locations in Redwoods National & State Parks. First up, Grove of the Titans! The interesting thing about this grove is that it’s not on the official Redwood National Park map. That’s because it became too popular in the Instagram and Google maps era. Visita...

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...