I recorded this way back in March when I flew out to Australia to visit a friend in Orange. I didn't realize how far Orange was from Sydney, so I ended up spending most of my time at an airbnb in Sydney, but then taking two trains and a bus over the course of 8 hours out to where by buddy lived in Orange. From there we drove a total of 12 hours North to the small Outback town of White Cliffs (stopping at a number of other small towns along the way.

I've long been interested in Australia--the band TISM and the radio play What's Rangoon to You is Grafton to Me. A concert Tom Waits did there in 1978, the bootleg of which was often regarded the best of the era in the cyber circles I ran in. Radio shows like The Night Air and Soundproof. Movies like Walkabout, Road Games, etc. And then there was a pen pal I had, who I last heard from during the pandemic, and my buddy Zech, who I met on Twitter via podcasting.

In White Cliffs, a lot of the people live in dugouts, or houses built agains the mountain which is they then dig the remainder of their residence into. We stayed in one of these houses which was being rented on airbnb. It is, so far, the most interesting place I've watched Frasier.

We got there late at night and couldn't find the place because the numbers on the houses are not chronological. They build their house and choose a number that isn't taken, which generally has no relation to the houses on either side. We missed out on our first day, only really getting the second day to explore, so we didn't really leave the town.

We ate breakfast and that night went back to the one bush bar in town, connected (I think) to a motel. We learned that night that of the people drinking there, most of them were working on natural gas pipelines. There was one woman, either between our ages or a little younger, who had moved there to be with her boyfriend. The rest of the town skewed much older.

There was one yard with a lot of welded sculptures, which was fun. There was a school, a small hospital, a couple of stores, a house made out of bottles that was no longer entertaining guests but still had a donkey tied up outside. The donkey walked over to me, then backed up, made eye contact with me, and squatted down to pee.

This recording is from the second night after my friend had gone to sleep. He had told me we were too far from the town to walk to it, but I think I made it there within 10 minutes. You can still hear the dogs barking from next to our airbnb throughout the recording. It's the desert, so I guess sound travels.

I believe this was around 11pm and the entire town had gone dark. Everyone had left the bar, the stores were all long closed, and there was no one else outside. I walked around for about an hour or so, stopping to take pictures and record videos of all of the vacant streets and buildings.

I realized I hadn't posted this after a woman visiting me from Sydney flew back there last week. She had super liked me on a dating app, but didn't appear until I was in White Cliffs. Then she disappeared and reappeared, but I couldn't like her back. When I was back in the States I saw her pop up again and tried to like her again but no luck. I finally contacted support and they fixed it, but I learned she was in Sydney. She was interested in making our relationship romantic, despite the distance, but when she got here she quickly changed her mind again. So it goes.

It's nice to listen back to this and put myself back in my literal headspace from a period when I was more content.

The recording ends when my batteries died.

My job sent me up to NYC for a conference and happened to get me a hotel in Times Square, which meant I was just a few blocks from Max Neuhaus's endless, easily overlooked sound art piece emanating from a sewer grate on Broadway between 45th and 46th St.

The installation, Times Square (Nehaus), is maintained by the Dia Art Foundation, which also maintains the Lightning Field in New Mexico, which I recorded myself walking around last year. They also maintain a room full of dirt somewhere in Manhattan, which I may check out next week after my birthday when I head back up. I think they're also doing a presentation about Steve McQueen's gallery work the same day and the Anthology Film Archive is doing something else interesting, so, why not.

The recording begins with me in my hotel room and follows as I take the (very brief) elevator trip to the lobby and then walk along 40th St and I forget where all else. I think I walked up 8th Ave for a bit before turning down 44th or something.

But you can hear the droning piece quite clearly around 13 minutes in and then on and off until the end. I stood there for about an hour overall, watching couple and obnoxious influencers take pictures directly overtop of it, paying no mind to the eerie sound rising from just below them. I don't know if I ever noticed it myself previously, so I have no idea what I assumed it was before. It has a vaguely mechanical tone to it, so I suppose anyone not poisoned by the Futurist Noise Manifesto haven't been predisposed to the musicality of heavy machinery.

If you go to check it out, I suggest doing so at midnight. I wasn't aware of this beforehand, but I learned that night that all of the screens around Times Square present a piece of video art. I've been informed since it rotates between different pieces, but I have no idea how many. The night I went was a piece involving shifting squares of sky with black birds flying between them. It was neat.

I've been thinking about the Danish term "uitwaaien," which refers to fighting anxiety by walking or jogging against a very strong wind. It's been something I've hoped to accomplish recently but unfortunately we've been in the middle of a slight Indian Summer (or is it too early?), so the air has mostly been mild and still. Originally I wanted to upload the recording I made walking along the coast in Cape May, which was full of noisy, distorted wind, but I think I lost it while clearing up SD cards prior to recording a couple of noise festivals.

I was also thinking about that recording in particular because it was about a month after my last major breakup, which took me nearly a year to get over. The car accident, car theft, two hospitalizations, both of my cats requiring countless expensive vet visits and then dying three days apart, two of my mom's cats dying, my mom's dementia growing significantly worse, a close friend moving out of the country for life saving surgery, and whatever else probably didn't help the grieving process. There was one person that suddenly appeared and unexpectedly helped a lot over a brief period, but such is life. I miss her and think about her often, but I know everyone's life is has its own unique challenges and I hope she's well and I hope to still hear from her again.

But, the Lightening Field. I'm not entirely sure when I became aware of it. It was either from a documentary on Land Art that played at the International House 7 or 8 years ago or from an audio recording, like this, on an Australian radio program in which the person recorded themselves walking around the field in the early morning.

There's no photography or video allowed of the installation or the cabin you stay in, but you can photograph the surrounding areas (which I did extensively) and record audio inside the exhibit... presumably. They never said anything about audio at least. So, here we are, with my trusty $70 binaural mics and my Zoom H5.

The piece is installed in an undisclosed location in the middle of the desert, roughly 3-4 hours outside of Albuquerque. It consists of however many aluminum polls set up equal distance from each other across the field. When you stand at specific angles and at specific times of day, you can't see them at all. When the sun sets or rises against them, it gives an impression like the angels standing on the beach in City of Angels (I think that's what it was called? That weird, more straight remake of Wim Wender's Wings of Desire, turned into some sort of romantic dramedy with Nicolas Cage and Meg Ryan).

It's beautiful. But the desert is always beautiful. I spent a lot of time out in the field also staring at dung beetles and little lizards. Also, when the sun was setting I pulled out my phone and was able to film it disappear behind the mountains in real time.

I think I recorded this in the middle of the night, when it was pitch black and I could barely make out where I was. In the beginning you can hear my friend who came with me and the family staying in the cabin with us (the one was a documentarian that disliked Agnes Varda, which I think left me so startled and depressed I was incapable of conversing normally for the next 24 hours), though they were all practically a mile away.

I don't hear it here, but I think I ultimately walked back as soon as I did because I heard rustling and I think the person who drove us out had noted that there were coyotes around. That might also be why I stopped about halfway through. I certainly wasn't looking at anything.

Since these get a weirdly high number of listeners when I update, and I assume most people are into musique concrete and thus may be into noise, here's the trailer for the noise movie my friend and I made out in Milwaukee and Fargo. It'll be available for sale on his bandcamp in the next month or so.

Sorry, as always, for my heavy breathing, coughing, and burping. Hope you're well.

Meant to upload this a couple of days ago for my girlfriend for Valentine's Day. She booked us a creekside home on AirBnB for my birthday a few weeks back. We could hear it just outside our window by the bed and she would go out each morning and evening and just sit there, looking off, listening. I snuck out while she packed and set up my binaural mics on a little head shaped wire sticking out of the ground, letting it run until the battery died.

Enjoy whatever you're doing and listen to the river sing sweet songs.

I went outside in the rain and sat under a giant umbrella while I drank coffee and read Severance (no relation to the show, despite the article I learned about it from indicating otherwise). You can hear the rain, police sirens, an airplane, some wind noise distortion, wind chimes, and a church bell. My girlfriend says the church bell is off-key, but it sounds fine to me. Maybe I'm tone deaf.

I missed my turn and ended up back at an entrance to the Wissahickon Trails I've previously used. Or I did at least once, to check out the Hermit's Cave.

The local clinic's pharmacy phone line hasn't been working for over a week, so I haven't been able to refill my prescription for my SSRI and now I can feel my brain again. These occasional brain quakes, like a skipping CD but of my consciousness, keep getting to me. It's like an internal tourette's. I don't know how many days it's been, but I've been getting nauseous, agitated, and just feeling generally uncomfortable for the past week. I don't know if I'm going to go back on, as this isn't the first time I've had trouble with the pharmacy. Guess we'll have to see how I act around people over the next week or so.

I got lost. Between my brain not functioning and an apparent emergency at my work I had to respond to, I had trouble keeping track of where I was going. When the nausea hit I realized I forgot my Pax 3 and just cut off the recording. Eating the months old peanut butter filled pretzels I found in my cabinet seemed to help. Upon arrival to the trail I realized I forgot my hiking shoes too. Enjoy the squishing of the mud for me, because it was hell to stay up in.

There's a giant pimple blooming on my cheek in the same area from my teens. I turn 34 in three weeks.

I'm breathing pretty heavy in this one.

Last night I went to see Eraserhead for the umpteenth time. It was being projected inside a tunnel under the disused train track (I believe the idea is to extend the brief rail park through here at some point) a block from where David Lynch used to live in Philly. The area is now lovingly referred to as "The Eraserhood," in reference to the influence the neighborhood had on the film and I believe some of the footage in the film being shot there. I thought the entire thing was shot in Philly, using his enormous home (which I believe he said was robbed 20-some times), but I've since seen footage of him and Jack Nance recollecting shooting the opening scene at a tunnel in LA. I'm also fairly certain he was enrolled at AFI in LA when shooting, so, I'm not sure. I believe all of his earlier shorts were at least shot at his Philly home.

This is a shorter walk than most, mostly because I got bored of just eves dropping on peoples' conversations as I walked to the next bar. After the film I waited in line at the Trestle Inn for the Eraserhood Forever afterparty. I spoke to ambitious 24-year-old who had driven out from Downintown. He had also attended alone. He had only first seen the film a year or two prior, seemed to have an excited and limited knowledge of Godard and Verhoeven (though my knowledge on the latter is even more limited). He had grand plans of quitting his software engineer job in DC, which he remotes into from his parents' place, living in an artists' loft and making movies. He has the money, so he keeps buying all the equipment to get it done. I hope he doesn't watch too much before making his second feature--it'd be more interesting to see a young, hungry, and pure perspective than another idiot like me trying to ape the new wave masters again.

I found a couple of interesting sounds on this walk. I was specifically looking for organic, industrial noises to compliment the film. I stood next to an air vent for a few seconds before you hear a couple open the door to the fancy condominium lobby and stare at me. Then I started hearing this eerie high pitched hum emanating from one of the few remaining factories. I couldn't decipher whether it was abandoned, there was all sorts of strange vegetation breaking the concrete around it. Either way, I walked the circumference of the block trying to pinpoint where the sound was emanating from but had no luck. You hear bits of it here. The most fun was the sewer grates hissing steam, a homeless person's closed carefully laid over them. I never noticed that these grates actually have the word "STEAM" engraved in the middle.

I haven't gotten around to recording any of my walks for a while, but I might this weekend if I can get my car back and go look for the ruins in the park so I can finally upload this damn album to bandcamp.

So, whilst driving home from my girlfriend's place in NJ, I realized I had my recording equipment on me. I put it on and started recording my drive. Then my car started sputtering and I had to pull over to see if I could figure out what was wrong. 

Surprise! I couldn't. 

Now it's been at Pep Boys for 2 days.

It sputtered the whole way home, roughly an additional 45 minutes (what you hear here). I left the windows down the whole way and just grinned my molars, hoping my windshield didn't fog up too much to see and that my motor wouldn't just crap out and fall through the bottom of my car.

The wind noise here might make it a little less relaxing than my walks, but I still think it sounds interesting. If anyone needs this for a project, like creating a mixtape made to sound like it's being heard from your car stereo while you drive around in early autumn with the windows down, here you go.

Hope to be back next week with my little walk through the woods in search of dead peoples' houses.

I think this may be my favorite recording thus far. I was fairly annoyed while walking because despite driving down this road each time I go to the office, it hadn't occurred to me that the walking path is primarily right against the road. My motivation for taking this walk was in part because I wanted to hear more of nature, of the water and trees on the other side of the trail.

Last Sunday I ended up in the hospital after passing out during an x-ray at an Urgent Care. Over the last week I had developed an increasingly inconvenient cough and occasional headaches. I'm vaccinated and most doctors have indicated I probably had COVID last January, before there were tests or we were even aware it had arrived here. Since then it's been discovered it may have been in the US as early as October or November 2019.

So, I doubted I had it again, but seemed better safe than sorry since most of my co-workers are not vaccinated for reasons I don't care to get into. All of the pharmacies on my way home from my mom's were booked until the following afternoon. Only a local Urgent Care still had time for tests, albeit with an appointment. After a rather generous raise in June, I finally signed up for healthcare through the exchange, so it was only $35. Fine. Whatever.

They had me wait there for the results, though I'm still not clear why. As I sat and laid down I became sicker and sicker. They had me take an x-ray to be safe (a bill for which I'm still awaiting...) Now, I don't know what's up with my body. There's so many things wrong with it and doctors have generally just waived them all away as not serious enough or labeled my various GI issues as IBS, which another doctor told me means "we know there's something wrong, we just don't know what." One of my issues is that when I raise my hands above my head, I get dizzy. Apparently I was dehydrated this day, so when they asked me to hold my hands above my head for the x-ray instead of simply getting dizzy, I collapsed on the floor.

Passing out is always a strange experience. At least my experiences have been. Each time it's happened to me I have dreamt, usually of my paternal grandparents, and for what felt like an entire evening but was only for a matter of seconds. Each time I wake up it's just like in the movies--first the faint sound of voices, then a bunch of unfamiliar faces, and then a moment of confusion as I realize I am not in fact in my bed, then a sudden and total awareness of where I am and what happened.

Anyway, that's why you'll hear me cough a few times. Also, I guess the initial point was I couldn't hear through my left ear while recording this, so I just assumed the traffic was more overwhelming and annoying than it is here.

Ironically, the constant whooshing of cars flying by (and they do tend to fly by on this terrifying, windy road) ends up sounding kind of like the ocean to me. As aggressive and terrifying as cars seem in real life, hearing the disembodied sounds of them pushing air past them is quite nice. I think this is the most relaxing and consistently enjoyable recording I have made to date.

Sorry about the coughing, though. I didn't wear a mask, so at least you can't hear me breathing this time.

I recorded this yesterday during a new weed holiday, seemingly created by the legal weed industry, called OIL Day. You see, if you look at the number 710 upside down it kinda looks like it says OIL.

I'm fairly certain this did not exist before this year and I have no intention of working it into my life in any meaningful way, but it meant I got 25% off another PAX pod at my normal dispensary.

The dispensary I go to is roughly a 20 minutes walk from my house. There's another place closer, but I'm a sucker for discounts. I have a Costco membership, I have Honey installed on all my browsers (for what it's worth), and I still get newsletters from monoprice, groupon, slickdeals, sidedeals, etc.

Far as I can tell, there's nothing special about this dispensary, but almost every time I go I get $5. Including yesterday. My $60 pod only came out to $40 after the discounts. What does that same pod cost at the place 10 minutes walk away? I don't know. Hopefully more than that.

So, I walk down to Frankford. There's no great way to do it, either. Winding through the weird Northern Liberties neighborhoods--post modern mcmansions tucked between the traditional nu-architecture of this city and 100-year-old rowhomes--and down across whatever section of 2nd St. is easiest today, then through the tighter rowhomes east of there and across the disparate area around Front St. leading to the Fillmore.

Listening now, I think yesterday's walk was one of my more aurally interesting. There's my house and me dropping my key (more just tossing it straight into the street), weird construction, echoey music from all angles, followed by the El and 95 overpasses.

The recording just ended for me and was immediately followed by "Balloon Balloon Air Squeak" from the royalty free Hannah Barbera sound effects collection I downloaded for another project. Suppose I'll move onto that project now.

I texted my mom. I took her last week to get the J&J vaccine (she's deathly afraid of needles, though she doesn't know or understand why), so I've done my part. Also I'll probably see her next weekend when she goes to see her granddaughter (my niece) for the first time. She was born in January, so... COVID. What else can be said that hasn't been talked about everywhere all the time for over a year now. I could talk about how yesterday was my dad's birthday and I haven't talked to him in 4 years, but I'm not really interested in discussing that right now.

Today I walked down to South St to meet a friend at Tattooed Mom's. She's flying back to Mexico later this week and is hoping to pick up some cheap insulin for my diabetic cat--assuming we can figure out how to get it back to the states. When her husband tried a couple weeks ago he was told that it wouldn't last the plane ride, but, I mean, diabetic people exist. They live normal lives during which they travel, sometimes great distances, and presumably still take insulin during those times. She tells me he was much more concerned when he thought it was for me than when she informed it was for my cat. So it goes.

Something I think about a lot while I'm walking is fences. I subscribe to a lot of newsletters, but this one passage from Numlock really stuck with me. It reads:

In the American West, you’re never too far from a fence. A new study estimated that at any given point, the nearest distance to any fence is usually less than 31 miles, and on average is roughly 2 miles. It’s estimated that the global length of fencing on Earth is 10 times the length of roads. Fences have unexpected impacts on ecology. For example, migrating pronghorn antelope have difficulty navigating the fences crisscrossing once traversable expanses, and fences that have long since outlived their usefulness have similar effects despite their vestigial use for landowners. Indeed, there is a serious issue for some species with “ghost fences,” which are when you remove a fence that has existed in a place for a long time but species continue on for generations avoiding a place because there used to be a fence there, because animals are weird and we kind of broke them with fences.

I don't think I had ever thought about it before reading this, but there are literally fences everywhere. Part of our capitalist obsession with property, of course, but I do wonder how much is actually necessary? When I think about prisons, the first thing I think about is all the fencing. There's fences all over the place, both indoors and out. There's fences between fences to segment people into even smaller gaps. How much of that is actually necessary? Years and years ago there was a report on the Daily Show, of all places, about a women's prison that ditched all of its fencing. A quick google search indicates it was probably about a prison in Shakopee, Minnesota, that later may have actually implemented some fencing. They never had any issues that would seem to implicate the need for fencing, so why bother? Evidently they reason they were considering it was an increase in drug-related crimes, which... is a whole other thing.

We're such a lazy society. Everything revolves around what you're being sold, not what you need. The whole point of an invention isn't that the world needs it, it's that you can convince the world that it needs it. The world has existed up until every invention perfectly fine. I won't prop up overpopulation myths, I think a lot of our issues lie more with limited perspectives and initiative. Because everything we do is based on cost, we cut corners and end up with endless landfills of plastic bullshit, daylight balanced street lights, and fences in the middle of nowhere protecting nothing because any more effort or redoing anything would cost too much up front.

In movies when you hear the sound of footsteps, cars driving by, the wind, etc., those are usually not exactly what you're seeing. Sometimes, particularly in lower budget movies, the sound will be recorded live, but for the most part what you're hearing is a recreation of those sounds either in a studio or recorded at another time, likely at a different location, by different people. If you've ever seen behind the scenes of a cartoon when they watch the clip and use whatever tools around them to try and create the sound you would hear in that situation, it's usually the same for live action sequences. This means what you are hearing is by design, it is chosen either by the director or the sound person/folly artist, or whoever. This includes wildlife documentaries, too. 

If you pay close enough attention you can sometimes notice that you'll hear one thing in a shot but another, despite them being of equal distance and volume in real life. They are choosing what is important for you to hear in order to give you the impression of being there, what they think you would normally notice, or what they want you to notice in order to set the atmosphere they are looking to create in that scene.

I think about this a lot while on these walks. I consider myself a fairly observant person, but when I have these mics in my ears and I'm trying to not cough, burp, or even breathe too heavily, I start noticing even more little sounds around me.

One time I took a girl on a first date to a midnight showing of Eraseherhead, which she had never even heard of (yes, I'm that kind of white guy). Afterward she texted me that she couldn't help but hear everything around her. The sounds in her uber, the sound of her toothpaste tube, and so on. It's interesting how much we naturally filter out, either for our survival, sanity, or just out of boredom. It's even more interesting when people make those decisions for us.

In these recordings you will of course hear everything. These are largely unedited, starting when I hit record and ending when I hit stop, and mostly untouched (I will generally apply a slight limiter and then boost the volume a little or remove random clicks from the glitching microphone). You are limited only by the range of my not terribly cheap but absolutely not expensive microphones. You can imagine what it is I'm doing, you can try to paint an image of my surroundings in your mind, or you can just tune it all out and let it seep into the background as if you were on the walk yourself. At most I'd be curious if you hear anything I don't, since you don't have the same distractions I do from my other five senses on these walks, not to mention my general anxiety.

Today I went for a walk with my lady friend in the town she resides, New Brunswick. I visit her most weekends and occasionally she comes back to Philly with me for the weekdays--she's a TA, so she can currently work remotely due to the pandemic. We actually tried to record our walk yesterday, but I forgot to set my H5 to hold and then apparently hit the stop button after 18 seconds.

We walked from around her place to a little manmade pond called Passion Puddle. Yes, Passion Puddle. Toward the end you can hear me briefly talk to a woman walking her dogs about the little turtles sunbathing on rocks. You can see the one in this episode's photo, the other got cropped out. There were a whole family of them, maybe 10 in all. As soon as I got close they jumped into the water, one by one.

At the end of our walk we sat on a bench and just listened to the one horny bird above, watching another couple feed rice cake to the turtles by throwing it directly at their heads. It was nice.

I don't record all of my walks, but I like to take a picture or two each time. Follow me on instagram @thecobblestonehighway if you'd like to see more and/or say hi. I have no idea if anyone listens to this.

Went for a walk from Northern Liberties into Old City. Only recorded one way, spent the walk back listening to Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Soundproof, a radio program that was unceremoniously cancelled in 2015 or 2016 only after a couple years on the air. It had actually followed the Night Air, a sound collage program that was unceremoniously cancelled just before it. Soundproof was somewhat similar, but it focused on all sorts of sound art, rather than just original collage work. It also featured interviews, experiments, field recordings, obscure music, and radio plays (including a broadcast of the classic 70s rock 'n roll radio play What's Rangoon To You Is Grafton To Me).

A major theme throughout the program was always recordings of nature, usually incorporated into a larger narrative, but there were plenty of recordings of people boating, riding trains, or just walking around. I always found it strangely enjoyable listening to someone else walking somewhere else, at a different pace than me. I never found it as competitive as when I tried to walk listening to Alan Vega's final album, paced to match his stride as he skulked around NYC late at night in the midst of his own apparent twilight.

During this walk I was able to close a ring on my Apple Watch--the first in a while. I know we're both always being watched and monitored while also not at all. The watch uses whatever algorithms to determine when I'm doing something out of the ordinary and then times it, but I also like to believe there's someone in a large, mostly empty office space with a cup of coffee that's mildly excited to see I finally closed another ring.

No interruptions on this walk. Just me on my own. Lots of wind noise, though.

The image for this episode comes from one of the underpasses for 676. I always go out of my way to walk under them when I'm heading downtown. It's nice that the lights remain so warm and calm. So often we're assaulted by new, impossibly bright LED bulbs inexplicably daylight balanced, making everything look cold and uninviting. They not only upset our circadian rhythms, but upset the brains and routines of nocturnal animals. They're a blight on modern society. By all means, replace the inefficient bulbs, but LED bulbs can be any fucking color, so why not make them something pleasant?

Inaugeral episode. I finally christen my binaural mics I bought over a year ago with a walk through the snow and such around my neighborhood in Northern Liberties, Philadelphia. I'll get an email address and all set up if anyone is listening to this and/or anyone wants to submit audio of their own walks.