Before moving to New Mexico, I worked at a multimedia studio in Minneapolis and one of the projects I was involved in there was to create an hour-long mix of environmental recordings intended to give the impression of moving through adjacent spaces.  It was a relaxation CD that some corporation was paying for to give to their employees.  The basic idea was that the listener was supposed to feel like they were walking across a field, through a forest and down to the beach.  I never knew what job these people did that their bosses felt they needed relaxation CDs, but by the end of the project I needed one because I had to work from library recordings and use really long crossfades and because Protools has this nasty need to play a mix in realtime as it bounces to the final product.

This recording, of course, is the real thing.  It took me a while to come up with a walking gear arrangement that worked for me.  Before putting together the binaural mics on my glasses with the modified fly-fishing jacket and making extensive use of belt-loops as cable ties, I had done other walking recordings (the Farolito Walk was a fun one) but always in relatively urban situations where a little cable noise wasn’t necessarily contrary to the sound of the environment.  I’m much happier with the results I get from my current rig and I think this recording shows it off well.  This isn’t a remote forest recording, just a short ramble up the Atalaya Hills arroyo by St. John’s College in Santa Fe, but I really like the percussive variation of my progress as I move through various textures.

If you like this, you might want to check out santafeSound.

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