Corwin Fields

Tree Squeaking In Wind

It was one of those perfect end-of-summer days.  There are hardly words to describe these days of course, which is why I took to recording and photography.  Wilderness State Park is a place that embodies everything I love about a natural setting.  Its isolated beauty is untouched by man.  You feel as if on the edge of the world, gazing into the deep blue of Lake Michigan.  You feel the immensity of your surroundings and your comparative smallness, your humbling irrelevance to it all.  This is a place I go to disappear, to experience an immersion with the landscape.  To me, this is the enlightened state, to be sitting and listening only.  

And this day was special for me, as I was leaving Michigan the following day for months.  I went here to have a special goodbye, quiet and alone.  Prior to coming, I had been seeking the situation of recording migratory geese.  I simply wanted to be in the right place at the right time.  And so, magically, I arrived at a small pond just inside the point, adjacent to (not coincidentally) Goose Bay, and there happened to be quite the gaggle resting peacefully at the shallow end of the water.  But where was my windscreen?  

In a moment of panic, I retraced my steps but to no avail.  It was gone with the wind.  Nonetheless, a relative calm prevailed in the atmosphere, and so I returned to the pond careful not to miss my golden opportunity with the geese.  And so I sat.  And waited.  It was getting dark and I had at least a four mile hike back to my car and yet, stubbornly, I had firmly decided that I was not going to depart until these geese did.  It was not an altogether silent wait: there were the sporadic, pleasing sounds of the endangered piping plover and squeaking seagulls.  Three hours later, the magic moment took place.  Slowly, I began to hear the cross-chatter of the geese; my ears attuned like a cat’s.  I watched in awe, as if a miracle were taking place.  It truly felt like a gift to witness this most graceful lift-off.  

In retrospect, I’m glad I lost the windscreen.  It’s comforting to know that there is no filter between that pond and my microphones, between the recording and you, the listener.  The subtle sound of the soft shore winds help contextualize the recording and give the listener a sense of vulnerability.  After all, in wilderness, we are primarily predator, and from us do all animals flee, including even this skein of geese.

From Gaggle to Skein of Geese, Wilderness State Park

rain falls inside a cabin / slow segue to rain falling outside a cabin

Rain Inside Out

Sounds Inside a Sailboat at Night

Sounds of the ocean as recorded on the far end of Naxos Island, Greece, in the remote area of Lionas.

Ocean Swallowing Rocks

David Fenech - Transalpine

Created yesterday from original recordings made on location under a bridge in Wester Ross, and in a hawthorn glade in north Northumberland.

It's Been a While

Yellowstone completely blew my mind. I now, finally understand why folks talk about it so much. I’ve been to national parks before. Badlands being the most recent that I visited in the beginning of this same road trip, but Yellowstone is like 20 national parks in one. I had no idea the vast amount of space and diversity that I was to witness every day we spent there. You can literally spend the entire day driving through the park, finding new sights and landscapes that are completely different to what you witnessed the day or even hours before. 

Regrettably, this is the only soundscape I captured from my trip to Yellowstone, being such a multifarious subject, but it also happens to be one of my favorites I’ve captured thus far. Never before have I captured the sound of ‘space’ like this. You can really hear the distance that surrounds you there. 

The trail we hiked is riddled with Lodgepole Pine trees that tower over you. I love these trees because you can hear them creak as they gently sway in the wind. Shortly after I started recording, what looked like a military-grade plane flew overhead, briefly shaking the near-silence as a reminder that even the most distant and heavily protected areas of our planet are still very much inhabited by humans in some shape or form. 

Yellowstone was on the tail-end of our mid-west travels this past October, starting in Des Moines, Iowa to Badlands, South Dakota and ending in Yellowstone National Park, with pitstops at Mount Rushmore and Sheridan, Wyoming to enjoy the local pub culture. 

3:31pm - 4:41pm
41°F and falling (Low of 15°F / High of 41°F)
Clear Skies
Wind: 5.8mph Variable
Humidity: 62%

Podcast

#16 Riddle Creek Trail, Yellowstone National Park | October 12th, 2018

Ubiquitous

Opoona Type Beat

#pianoday2020 What would happen if every note in a piano piece were played on a different piano? A sort of piano-based ‘klangfarbenmelodie’.

patterns and accidents vol 2

every piano in the shop

s8v1   [brooklyn]

qu 1

Robbie Martin is joined once again by deep politics researcher gumby4christ to discuss the mysterious origins of COVID-19 and to parse through the torrent of anti-China propaganda seeping it's way into the US media ecosystem on all sides. 

As a growing consensus builds around the possibility of COVID-19 being man-made/lab-created Robbie and gumby4christ examine why the Wuhan Institute of Virology was scapegoated as the culprit while neocon think-tanks and other nefarious political actors (including from the 'intellectual dark web') omitted the involvement of white Americans with ties to the US bioweapons industry when rushing to characterize this possible scenario as a Chinese military bio-weapons release.

Intro/outro song: Guzz - Temple Encounter
https://guzz.bandcamp.com/

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FOLLOW // twitter.com/AbbyMartin // twitter.com/FluorescentGrey // twitter.com/gumby4christ

Media Roots Radio 

The Oswald Institute of Virology, COVID-19 Origins & US Military Biowarfare w/ gumby4christ

experimental • field recording • narrative sound collage 

"Wolf Songs Folk Songs" vinyl available now.  Here is a review from Lost in a Sea of Sound:

"The connective fibers of the physical and spiritual glide effortlessly on this sonic journey.  Wolf Songs Folk Songs can be a cool canopy to rest under or a sun drenched warm hilltop field, but this requires an investment from each listener.  The compositions tremendous diversity and complex patterns is like a heavy shower of rain. Listening under covered shelter a few times eventually provides the soundness to feel comfortable getting soaked.

Corwin Trails is the yoke pulling music heritage and innovation. Ten tracks, constellations in the night sky. Outlines in sound resting in current temporal sonic state. Beauty finding place in what remains unreachable, Corwin Trails rhythmic composites are like undiscovered elements within the planet's crust. Creating another aspect of these harmonies are field recordings from around the world and actual sounds from the forests of Corwin Trails home in Michigan. After many listens, one comparison that came to mind a few times is the album Lost and Safe by The Books."

From Gaggle to Skein of Geese, Wilderness State Park

corwin trails

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