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A bit late on this. Things are a bit busy in these parts at the moment. Here’s a round up of what I got up to during February and March.

Disquiet Junto

Over the course of March I found myself getting back into the swing of participating in Disquiet Junto assignments on a consistent basis. It’s been really nice to reacquaint with the assignments and the community after what has been a bit of a break over the summer. As has always been the case, participating in the Junto also provides some excellent creative prompts for when I’m in a bit of a rut or after a bit of additional inspiration. It’s been especially helpful lately with the projects I’m jumping between.

Here’s a rundown of my submissions during March. I’ve included links to the posts on the Lines forum if you’d like to read about the creative process behind them.

Tristan Louth-Robins · [Disquiet Junto 0740] Heavy Set

Track notes: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0740-polychord-amorous/74172/4

Tristan Louth-Robins · [DisquietJunto 0741] Subtle Reinforcements

Track notes: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0741-balance-beam/74223/23

Tristan Louth-Robins · [DisquietJunto 0742] Tapping Softly, Tapping Brightly

Track notes: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0742-sensitive-math/74282/20

Tristan Louth-Robins · [DisquietJunto 0743] This Must Be The Space

Track notes: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0743-make-it-happen/74324/11

Exploring some personal statistics

Over the years I’ve maintained a lot of datasets, and one of these is a list of all the Junto projects I’ve participated in since I joined the Lines community back in mid-2019. Since picking things up again this year, I thought it was high time that I explored some trends in this dataset using R.

This first plot visualises all 117 projects I’ve submitted over the years and I’ve annotated some of the key areas. My initial period of participation was pretty regular throughout 2019 and 2020, before dropping off significantly. I found this patchy run over the following three years pretty surprising since I had this impression that 2024 and 2025 the most quiet, but that doesn’t appear to be the case at all! I do wonder about the reliability of my memory.

At the time of writing I’m currently maintaining a healthy streak coming into April. As you can see in the second plot below, I was thoroughly engaged in the Junto during 2019 and into 2020 as the pandemic took hold.

Album-in-progress: White Sands

At the time of writing (mid-April) I’m in the final stages of mixing my new album for De La Catessen Records, White Sands. I’ve been working on it since returning from overseas back in November last year and the pace has picked up lately as I work towards a live performance at the New Found Sound festival in Port Adelaide on May 9th. 

New Found Sound 2026

I was thrilled to be invited to perform at the 2026 iteration of New Found Sound festival. This year there’s 40 artists performing across five primary venues, including the historic Waterside Workers Hall and Pirate Life Brewing. I’ll be performing on the ship at the Maritime Museum along with little-scale (aka Sebastian Tomczak) and Emma Gregan. Another reason for finalising White Sands is that the performance at the festival will also provide a launch opportunities for preorders.

A new-ish essay

I’d covered this in the little interim post last month, but thought I would mention it again. During March I got back into the swing with writing and published a new essay on my Substack touching on themes of depression, ecology and making sense of the present. You can read it here: https://substack.com/home/post/p-190461827

I thought I’d also drop a bit of trivia on the essay titles. To date, all but two of the essays published on Joy In Ruination have titles taken from either songs, album or book titles. The reason for this is because I often struggle to come up with meaningful titles for these essays and sometimes an adjacent reference – even if the source doesn’t directlyrelate to the subject of the essay – often does the trick.

• I’d Rather Be Lonely (published September 2022) – “I’d Rather Be Lonely” – song by Loudon Wainwright 
• There goes the ice (published October 2022) – “There Goes The Ice” – song by Robyn Hitchcock & KT Tunstall
• The chorale sea (published January 2023) – “The Chorale Sea” – song by Split Enz
• Place to be (published March 2023) – “Place To Be” – song by Nick Drake 
• It’ll take a long time (published July 2023) – “It’ll Take A Long Time” – song by Sandy Denny
• The ongoing moment (published March 2024) – “The Ongoing Moment” – book by Geoff Dyer
• Blending in with the crowd (published April 2024) – aha! totally original!
• Pink Twine (published February 2025) – again! This one’s named after the work the essay covers.
• Collapse Into Now (published March 2026) – R.E.M’s final album from 2011, Collapse Into Now

More Oblique Strategies

As I’d noted in the previous monthly update, I’ve been readily applying the Oblique Strategies to assist me with the development of a new album, amongst other things. The general rule is that at the beginning of a given week or fortnight, I’d select three cards from the deck at random and pin them to my cork board near my desk. The decision on whether to refresh the cards at the start of the week depends entirety on the prompt’s effectiveness and potential to sustain inspiration into the future.

Here’s a couple of trios from March:

“Are there sections? Consider transitions.”
“Once the search is in progress, something will be found.”
“Do the words need changing?”

“Not building a wall but making a brick.”
“What are you really thinking about just now? Incorporate.”
“Bridges. – build – burn.”

Just a quick one to let you know that I’ll be rolling the February activity into the March update in a couple of weeks. There wasn’t necessary a shortage of things that I got up to, it’s just that everything might be a bit more substantial when combined.

In short, some things I’ve recently been up to in the first half of March:

• I’ve just planted the autumn/winter vegetable garden following an incredibly hot and dry January and February. The kale, beetroot, chard, parsley, cauliflower is primed to go along with the few spring onions and patch of thyme that survived over the summer. There’s quite a bit of general garden maintenance that needs to happen before daylight savings ends and things cool down a little.
• I finally wrote a new essay on my Substack! If you like this kind of thing then please consider subscribing for free since I no longer post essays to this blog. You can read the new essay here: https://substack.com/home/post/p-190461827

• There’s a stack of books I’m currently working through. A big stack that keeps growing due to compulsive purchases and a very active library card. Current reads includes Simon Winchester’s wonderful history of wind (The Breath of the Gods), Carl Magnus Palm’s massive history of ABBA (Bright Lights Dark Shadows) and George Monboit and Peter Hutchison’s vital and concise explainer on the history of neoliberalism (The Invisible Doctrine.) I realise that’s three lots of history. Typically my annual reads comprise of 2/3 of non-fiction and 1/3 fiction. Aside from reading High Fidelity earlier this year, I’ve really got to up my game on the fiction front.

Introduction (notes on 20 years of blogging)

As I was writing up the surrounding items for this month’s post it occurred to me that I’ve been maintaining blogs for 20 years. As this thought occurred to me I was also aware that I’d set up a task for myself to write up an ‘about’ section for Maurilia Station.

So what better way to muse on two decades of blog activity, touch on how the internet has changed in that time and explain the general scope of this blog (as it is now) than to fold it all into a fairly succinct ‘About This Blog’ statement:

Maurilia Station can be traced back to my main blog which I started in 2006 on Blogspot, and then continued to maintain on WordPress. 

For a web-based entity that has existed for 20-odd years, it can probably be expected that this blog has undergone a lot of changes over the years. It certainly has. 

In spite of these changes, it persists as a niche repository of information; a comparative atomic speck caught up in the nebulous drift of the internet. A drift that – depending who you speak to – might reckon has recently settled into a state of stagnation.

I don’t fully subscribe to the ‘Dead Internet’ theory, but in recent years I’ve come to value the importance of internet media such as blogs, which seem to reside far beyond the totemic media pillars (namely social media) which dominate so much web based activity in the 2020’s.

hadI renamed this blog Maurilia Station during the Pandemic Era, as the use of the internet began to increasingly cloister around apps and corral the eyeballs, minds and attention spans of everyone with a smartphone. Even more recently, we now have the multitude of slop-generating agentic bots to contend with.

As I write this at the start of 2026, blogs are up against it. But I’m heartened by the individuals and groups actively working against the trend of a shrinking, homegenous internet. Twenty years ago I would have never imagined something like maintaining a blog as an act of resistance, but here we are.

Is Maurilia Station a reference to a make-believe radio station, an outpost or an interchange? I don’t really know, but I appreciate that the meaning can change from time to time, at least for me. Perhaps that’s the point of it.

Back in the days of RSS feeds and blogrolls, the blog was a designated destination for the visitor (both the curious and dedicated), far removed from the fleeting spectacles of click-bait and the attention-eroding nature of infinite scrolls. A blog was and is – ideally – a place you could spend a fair amount of time to read current and past posts.

I haven’t always been able to guarantee a semblance of consistency on this blog, but since it was renamed I’ve endeavoured to keep things fairly structured. At the very least, you’ll see semi-regular updates on what I’m up to creatively.

Long live the blog! Fight the homogeny!

More travel writing? Not for now, but elsewhere soon

Back in December 2025 I had the intention of writing at length on my travels through Scotland, England, Belgium and Germany. From the outset this was successful, but I think I frightened myself with the painstaking zeal that I poured into 6000-ish words covering one week in Scotland.

Even at that point I knew that this probably couldn’t be maintained on a month-to-month basis. I’m not inconsistent by nature, but I’m older (and…wiser?) enough now to know when I’ve waded out too deep. If you read last month’s post you might recall that I’d deferred the England instalment to this month. Now it’s already this month and the waters look deep. Are you already getting a hint?

Yes, that’s right: I’m keeping to the respectable shallows once again this month. I’m not going to be writing about my England travels at length this month.

Rather, I’d really like to crack on with getting some other writing done soon. In the form of essays – remember those?

So you can expect at some point that travel-and-listening adjacent essays will materialise on my Substack page. Over the course of this year parts of my recent travels will fold into this. I’ve already drafted an outline for a text covering my pilgrimage to Maryon Park in London.

Systems for making an album

Another activity that has been consuming considerable chunks of time is a new album that I’m working on which will be called White Sands. I hinted at this work-in-progress briefly in last month’s post and I thought I’d provide an insight into some of the system that I’m using for organising ideas and creating some of the music.

I can’t guarantee that these examples will provide a compelling or understandable through-line to exactly what it is I’m doing, but they might give you an understanding of some of the methods I’ve been employing lately.

It goes without saying that basically anything can be regarded as a system, providing that it’s a thing that is connected to another thing that results in some other kind of thing. Instead of digressing into the frustratingly rhetorical, I’ll keep my examples capped to three things which are related to the making of this album.

Hand-drawn diagrams

We’ll start with the tried and true. An approach I’ve used for as long as I can remember.

Over the years on this blog I’ve provided the occasional glimpse into my notebooks, often when I’m working on a something like an installation or sound design project. Depending on the scope or stage that the project is up to, the notes can vary from unintelligible scribbles to articulate intentions, but moreover there’s always bound to be a diagram of some kind lurking on a page.

During January the frequency of little diagrams picked up, often sandwiched between scrawls of writing. Most of these consist of simple graphic scoring, a chord/texture block sequence, or a combination of the two. There’s another type I’ve been using as well, but I’ll come to that in the next example.

Aside from the fact that these diagrams appear quickly dashed out (attempting to match the velocity and veracity of my thoughts when I was unable to articulate something with a description), the unifying aspect is that they all stick to similar dimensions; lengthy on the horizontal (representing time), whilst the vertical consists of either blocks or a stratification of intended sounds.

As systems, these diagrams might get further developed into something as simple as a chord progression, a MIDI block or a detailed graphic score. In the case of these examples, we’re looking at sketches for the structure of two tracks in progress, “Sands, White” and “Chalk Drift”.

For about the last 20 years, whenever I look back over these diagrams I’m occasionally struck by how utterly inconsistent they can appear form page to page, sometimes even within the span of a single day or session.

You should of course never compare yourself to anyone else, but we’re fallible humans after all, so I will sometimes look at these unruly diagrams and think to myself, “this all looks far messier, disorganised and inconsistent that what artist/musician x did.”

But in these moments of fallibility what I’m neglecting to consider is that there are often unseen curatorial layers at work, so that what you often see are the most coherent and aesthetically agreeable examples of what got scrawled into artist/musician x’s notebook.

At a more mundane – but no less relevant – level, I might have only had a humble pencil handy or a subset of the contents of my beloved pencil case. Whereas artist/musician x might have had their act together more on a given day with all the pencils, pens, rulers and so forth within reach. Christ, they may even have had assistants to do this for them. Remember this.

When I do have most of my pencils, pens and rulers within reach, I might be inclined to lean into this next example.

Markov Chains

Any reader of this blog who has been following the last couple of years will have seen mention of Markov Chains featured in posts here and there. I’m not going to bore you with the specifics of what a Markov Chain is at a mathematical level, but to summarise I will quote myself from this previous post:

The key feature of a Markov Chain, unlike other probability and Machine Learning algorithms is that their predicted future state is dependent entirely on their current state. So in this respect, their past is irrelevant; where it’s currently at is all that matters. Another important factor is that most Markov Chain algorithms will tend to gravitate from recurrent states (random walks, lots of transitions) to equilibrium states (a settled order of transitions.)

In a nutshell, we’re dealing with a system of probabilities. What I particularly like about Markov Chains is that a set of probabilities are defined from the outset and the transitions from state-to-state will largely adhere to these probabilities, but invariably drift over time. The degrees of drift and how much the Markov system evolves (and ultimately reaches a state of equilibrium) depends entirely on the weight of these probabilities and the nature of interactions between states.

The other attraction of Markov Chains is that they are inherently diagrammatic, consisting of a network of states, directional lines and their respective probabilities. In contrast to the earlier example of chord blocks laid out in strict sequence, I might quickly draw up a Markov Chain diagram to suggest a chord progression, but allow the possibility for other outcomes.

That’s the beauty probability really, and having a more abstracted means of determine where something can potentially go (as opposed to explicitly laying out its course) is a handy creatively strategy.

Here’s some Markov Chain diagrams I bashed out in about ten minutes:

And a couple of fancier Markov Chain diagrams I spent an afternoon on:

These last couple of fancy Markov diagrams look a bit strange don’t they? What’s going on with those ‘realms’?

Well, that’s not a technical hallmark of visualising Markov Chains, but something that I incorporated into these as a way of thinking about the way that the probabilities underpinning the ‘random walk’ of a Markov Chain leads to the following of certain paths and circulating areas of a given network. I’ve always loved this characteristic of these systems, where the process can circulate in a particular area and then – depending on the probabilities – might wander off into another area. It got me thinking of maps and especially walking trails, and how the latter is bound by certain features and geographies.

In these examples I’ve annotated these realms with different colours. It’s been fun to embed these Markov Chain designs in a software program (such as MaxMSP) and use this to produce a roll of MIDI data and trace how the process follows the probabilities and moves between realms.

I made a short little video featuring the first Markov system demonstrating this.

These Markov diagrams also bear some relation to the hand-drawn maps I created whilst I was travelling last year. And – in a way – these hand-drawn maps have also served as a system in the process of making the album. I might circle back to these hand-drawn maps in a future post.

For the last example, I have Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt to thank.

Oblique Strategies

We all know about the Oblique Strategies don’t we? If not, have a read here.

Quite a few years ago, a friend had gone to the effort of painstakingly printing out five editions worth of Oblique Strategies on card, cutting these out individually and presenting them to me in humble black box for my birthday. What a gift! Somewhat disgracefully, I haven’t actually dived into this box much over the years, but recently I remembered that I had this resource at my disposal and made sure it was somewhere visible in my studio.

As the album work has ambled along throughout January, these creative strategies have come in handy for when I’ve found myself creatively blocked; whether it was being unsure of next steps, caught up in a mental loop or generally despairing.

A useful strategy-for-these-strategies has been to select three cards at random and use only these for the following week.

For the first week these were my prompts:

• Imagine the piece as a set of disconnected pieces
• Intentions – credibility of, nobility of, humility of
• Consider different fading systems

Then the three prompts for the following week:

• Be less critical more often
• What would your closest friend do?
• Simply a matter of work

Lo-fi granular synth ARC Regional Music Project

Over a weekend in mid-January I had the opportunity to participate in a workshop run in conjunction with Griffith University and RMIT. Over the past year, the ARC Regional Electronic Music Project has been visiting regional centres around Australia (from Castlemaine in NSW to Denmark in WA) to investigate how the combination of local infrastructure and online resources can work to foster creative communities outside major cities.

A core activity of this initiative are the workshops facilitated by the team, where participants are guided through the process of building of lo-fi electronic instruments.

I’d been involved in discussions with the team over Zoom last year to gauge what the regional electronic music scene was like in South Australia and considering a place to potentially host a workshop. The team reached out to the Sauerbier House Cultural Exchange in Port Noarlunga, which seemed like a good fit to attract artists based to the south of the greater Adelaide region. I was invited to participate in the workshop on the basis that a lot of my projects are based in the Fleurieu region and I was excited to come along and participate.

The Lo-fi Granulator

For the workshop we would be building a lo-fi granulator developed by the technical team. All the required parts were provided, including the integrated circuits, cables, knobs, buttons, speakers and a breadboard to plug everything into. One of the most impressive elements of the synth is the wooden laser cut case that housed all of the components. On completion, it’s a really visually impressive piece of hardware.

The team has published the schematics, software and documents as open source resources and they’re available on the developer’s GitHub repository here.

All up, the workshop build took about four hours, allowing time for a couple of tea breaks as well as participating in group surveys conducted by the researchers.

Collaborating With Machines

The next day, the participants of the workshop were invited to demonstrate their newly built granulators at the Adelaide Contemporary Experimental event, Collaborating With Machines. A few of us took up the offer and it was a fun opportunity to present short sets between artist talks, group discussions and live performances by Stephen Atkinson, Phantom Chips (Tara Pattenden) and others.

I performed a 10-minute set consisting of the granulator (pre-loaded with three of my own samples) and a modular synthesiser which was manipulating field recordings. The video below is a short demo of the sounds I presented in the set and provides an overview of how the granulator works.

Incidental mentions Wrangling In The Antipodes

My data science and acoustic ecology blog, Wrangling In The Antipodes is clocking up its fifth year since I launched it back in 2021. Since the early tentative steps for employing data science tools in conjunction with acoustic ecology, the blog’s since grounded itself as a repository for my activities in this space. Lately I’ve been leaning into practical applications for Python’s scikit-maad library which can accomplish some really impressive results with acoustic ecology data.

Beginning with an overview of rendering circadean soundscapes, this month I published an overview of the False Colour Spectrum and its application for interrogating soundscape data visually.

Plans for the sound map in 2026

Following the big 2025 Fleurieu & Kangaroo Island Sound Map update, during January I started jotting down some ideas for the sound map in 2026. Aside from honouring some of the things I promised to eventually do, I’ve been giving some thought to sites of interest which might become ongoing case studies for the project.

If you followed the latest update, you will have seen that some of the more recent site inclusions come been from a return to Lady Bay reef on the western fringe of the Fleurieu Peninsula. An inspiration for this return was to observe any noticeable impacts of the ongoing algal bloom affecting South Australian coastal ecosystems.

I’m keen to continue this work across the reef system in 2026 and in February I’ll be heading a little further south to start make recordings at Shelley Beach where the reef system extends to. I’ll provide an update on this activity in next month’s post.

Following last month’s extensive write-up on a week of travels in Scotland during October, I’ve decided to rein things in and give the travel writing a pause for this month and stick to ‘business as usual’. Next month I’ll resume with a write-up covering my travels through England. There’s also a lot planned for 2026 too.

2025 Sound Map update

With seven hours to spare in 2025, I proof read and published the website updates for the Fleurieu & Kangaroo Island Sound Map. Following a refresh of the web cache to check that everything looked okay I still had time to prepare dinner and settle in with Lauren to watch Lawrence Of Arabia on New Years Eve, as you do.

Here’s a video which serves as a summary of the updates.

Even by the previous year’s exhaustive standards, this year’s update was gargantuan with a whopping 33 new site additions added to the map. A regression model that predicts how much effort is required for x site additions would be ideal at some point, but I’ve done this long enough to know that as the number of sites increases for a given update, so too does the dangerously exponential gradient representing time, energy and everything else required to get it done.

This isn’t even counting the additional layers of work I worked into the mix this time around. Before I got to undertaking this update, 2025 was already a mad year and it seemed miraculous that I had found a final surge of energy to sneak the sound map update under the wire.

Aside from giving the website a general overhaul, I’d also devised the idea to create some visual media for the socials which I thought might make the sound map a bit more interesting and accessible.

Catch them all

These visuals took the form of what I’m calling ‘sound cards’ which resemble a digital version of trading/role playing cards. The ‘front’ part of the card consists of a photo (indicative of the site recording) as a background, a handwritten site title and a little illustrated icon representing the general location. Against the background photo on the ‘front’ card is an animated waveform of the audio.

I spent a lot of time working on handwritten bits and design, as well as drawing a selection of icons in the digital art tool, Procreate. This tool is how I’ve created the previous Sonic Recall web comic series.

I’ve probably mentioned this is a distant blog post (or somewhere on social media), but something I’ve long lamented about my sound-based practice is my inability to listen to music as I work on my own sound-based things. For a sound artist that’s some knotty, convoluted logic right there. Obviously it’s a pretty stupid idea to try and listen to Jethro Tull as I edit field recordings, so occasional drawing and design is a better fit for passively indulging in 7/4 time and copious amounts of flute.

Anyway, back to the cards. On the ‘flip’ side is some concise ‘metadata’ for the site, followed by a couple of additional panels summarising the field note text that accompanies each of the sites. All up, I thought it would be a nice way to provide folks with a unique point of access for some of the new sites featured on the sound map without actually having to go to the website itself in the first instance.

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Website updates and improvements

There have also been a few updates and improvements made to the map and the surrounding webpages.

Information widget

One of the most overdue improvements to the map has been the inclusion of an information widget which users can access whilst in the map interface. Last year I had moved the landing page from the ‘About’ section to the map itself. Whilst I thought this was a logical thing to do, it presented some problems in terms of users find their way to the adjacent pages consisting of site lists, new additions and so forth. The solution I developed at the time was to include these page links in the pop-up that appears when you click on a site pin, but it still wasn’t the most intuitive approach.

For the development of the widget I hit up Stack Overflow and pieced together a solution. With a bit of trial and error I found a way of building in some JavaScript functionality within the R script that builds the Open Street Maps map interface.

Default map view

This widget works nicely and so does the other minor feature I positioned next to the info button – a crosshair icon which allows the map to revert back to its default view. Something that I’d found a bit nigglesome with the map navigation was having to zoom all the way back out when I’d inspected a cluster of pins. Now all you have to do is click this button and rocket back out into the upper atmosphere where you can see the peninsula, Kangaroo Island and the host of colourful pins.

Webpage layouts and aesthetic

I’ve also given the page layouts a tidy overhaul to improve the readability and structure. I honestly don’t know what I was thinking with the colour scheme that persisted for the previous couple of years, but it’s evident that I was enamoured with mango and peach colours in spite of the fact that you had to occasionally squint or draw the curtains to the room to read the text without getting a headache.

Yes, the sound map doesn’t look great on your smartphone

Despite all these welcome tweaks there is still an elephant in the room. By which I mean your smartphone.

Yes, the sound map still looks terrible on a phone and I’m doing what I can to incrementally improve this. In the meantime, I’ll kindly ask you to turn your phone sideways to improve the usability of the map and the adjacent pages.

My 2025 in a stack of books

Not only were there 33 new sites added to the sound map, but I managed to read 33 of these anachronistic containers of information over the course of 2025. Books! That, much like the achievement of this year’s sound map update, is something of a record.

It’s not only a testament to finding the time to do this somehow, but also maintaining a level of focus to read for consistent spells. It didn’t always used to be like this, and this was way before our phones corralled every grain of our precious attention.

My advice: toss your phone across the room or switch the damn thing off when you pick up a book.

As for the books of 2025, once again non-fiction dominated the list and the remainder was taken up with fiction in the realm of straight-up stories or a couple of poetry collections.

Here’s a complete list in chronological order.

^ is fiction; % is non-fiction; ~ is whether I’m reading this book again.

• “How To Speak Whale” – Tom Mustill %
• “In A Flight of Starlings” – Giorgio Parisi %
• “Before the Coffee Gets Cold”- Toshikazu Kawaguchi ^
• “Thousand Cranes” – Yasunari Kawabata ^
• “The Garden Against Time” – Olivia Laing %
• “Love In The Days of Rage” – Lawrence Ferlinghetti ^
• “Bad Gays” – Hew Lemmey %
• “Nina Simone’s Gum” – Warren Ellis %
• “How To Be Animal” – Melanie Challenger %
• “Small Hours” (John Martyn biography) – Graeme Thompson %
• “Slow Productivity” – Cal Newport %
• “The Third Policeman” – Flann O’Brien ^
• “Beyond The Wall: East Germany 1949-1990” – Katja Hoyer %
• “Deep Work” – Cal Newport %
• “I Think of You” – Alexander McCall Smith ^
• “Look To Windward” – Iain M Banks ^
• “The Bridge” – Iain Banks ^
• “I Love The Bones of You” (memoir) – Christopher Eccleston %
• “The Living Mountain” – Nan Shepherd %
• “Raw Spirit” – Iain Banks %
• “Exterminate/Regenerate” (a history of Doctor Who) – John Higgs %
• “The Science of Happiness” – Bruce Hood %
• “Foster” – Claire Keegan ^
• “The Names” – Don DeLillo ^
• “Co-Intelligence” – Ethan Mollick %
• “William Blake vs ThE World” – John Higgs %
• “White Sands” – Geoff Dyer %~
• “Levels of Life” – Julian Barnes %
• “The Search” – Geoff Dyer ^~
• “First Time Ever” (memoir) – Peggy Seeger %
• “Liner Notes” (memoir) – Loudon Wainwright III %
• “The Lost Rainforests of Britain” – Guy Shrubsole %
• “Homework” (memoir) – Geoff Dyer %

Five highlights

“How To Speak Whale” – One of best examples of nature writing I’ve read. It hits all the right spots in terms of getting an understanding of the topic, its underlying science, the wider environmental context and the motivations of the author, all the while remaining very accessible to the reader.

“Bad Gays” – An astonishing historical account of homosexuality, told through the lives and legacies of contentious individuals.The chapters on the Roman Emperor Hadrian, Lawrence of Arabia and J Edgar Hoover are especially remarkable.

“Exterminate/Regenrate” – A entertainingly detailed history of Doctor Who. A riveting read that I burned my way through over two nights in the middle of winter.

“Foster” – A tiny novella that could be read in about an hour. I’ve always appreciated seemingly innocuous straight tales that can be absolutely devastating.

“The Lost Rainforests of Britain” – The sole book I bought from the LRB bookstore when I was in London back in October. By crikey, it took a long time to get through this (two months!), but it was one of those nature books that are best absorbed in chunks of 10 pages here and there. It’s accesibly dense. A gnarly wood of research smothered in alluring mosses and fungus. A great read, and it’s inspired me to get down this year to finally visit the temperate rainforests on the west coast of Tasmania. The author’s BlueSky account is great too.

Variable levels of disappointment

“The Garden Against Time” was – by anyone’s standards – an excellent book, but by Olivia Laing’s standards I felt a bit let down by it.

Not liking “The Third Policeman” might sound like heresy to someone who enjoys magical realism and meta-fiction, but I couldn’t maintain much of a interest in Flann O’Brian’s stream-of-consciousness prose. I’ve never much liked Hunter S Thompson for the fact it’s like I’m reading through the haze emitted by a copious intake of drugs. Burroughs too. In a similar way, reading “The Third Policeman” was too much of a squallid drunken ramble for me. Maybe I’ll try again in a few years.

On another booze-related strand, “Raw Spirit” by the great Iain Banks was surprisingly terrible. There are a couple of his non-SF novels which are also average-to-terrible (see Canal Dreams) so there’s a couple of potholes in an otherwise peerless run. Based on this excellent strike rate, I thought the man could safely pull off some non-fiction with his usual blend of erudite wit.

No.

All up it consisted of shockingly pedestrian writing, suspiciously reading like Banks was working on the principle that they had been commissioned to write an article for the paper, but then remembered they had been asked to turn it into a book. A near ordeal.

A new album in the works

Lastly, I’ll mention that I’m working on a new album, working title: White Sands. That title was mentioned somewhere else in this post wasn’t it? Is there a connection between a book by Geoff Dyer and this project? Sort of, yes.

Towards the end of December I started weaving together various ideas and observations from my recent travels. From this, I sifted through field recordings, their scribbled annotations and attempted to make sense of some narrative structures. Then musical content got dabbed around. On one day it might be akin to a delicate watercolour technique; other times, the hasty application of a bucketload of hot pink.

Not to give too much away, but as I write this in mid-January 2026 decent progress is being made. I’ve had a couple of recent conversations with people about how it’s all coming together and the descriptions that I’ve been using circulate around: ‘a bit of a slippery fish’, ‘not entirely ambient’, ‘still vaguely melodic’ and – even more intriguingly – ‘confronting middle age in an adjacent way’.

By the time I write up a post covering January activities (in about a month’s time) it will certainly be as less slippery thing (I’m working on a deadline), but still hopefully adhering to most of those other descriptions.

In October I embarked on a long overseas vacation with my partner Lauren. We visited parts of Scotland and England, a smidge of Belgium and wound down things in Germany. This trip was ‘long’ by my standards, since I hadn’t been overseas for more than a week in nearly ten years and it was my first trip to Europe since slogging through my Masters research way back in 2008.

Whilst my travels overseas in Europe consumed one third of the antipodean springtime, the sheer density of rambling, ruminating, recording and subsequent recovery casts a dominant presence over this instalment on the blog. There’s a few other things I’ll cover here, but for the most part it’s all travel-centric.

I’ll briefly cover those other things here:

• There’s a Fleurieu & Kangaroo Island Sound Map update coming in late-December.
• I’m currently working on a new album for Delacatessen Records.
• The Black Squeaker Project culminated in a concert at Elder Hall which I couldn’t attend because I was sick coupled with intense jet lag. A horrendously inconvenient combination. I’ll cover this more comprehensively in a near-future blog post.
• One big agenda item for 2026 is to get back into writing projects. If this post covering my travels is anything to go by, the wheels and gears are sufficiently lubricated and ready to spin into action next year.

So before we get into the European content, I’ll also mention that I’m hoping to resume monthly post on the blog starting next month and continuing this trend into 2026.

Eurotrip 25: The Scotland part

I’m going to be sensible here. When I planned this chunk of writing I thought I’d consolidate all Europe travels in a single post. Bad idea! I started writing about the first week and realised, “Oh, this is already quite long.” So I’m just going to cover my first week in Scotland for this post and then move onto England and Belgium/Germany in the next couple posts to come. However, be warned: this post is a bit longer than usual.

First, a bit of background is probably necessary to explain why I’m writing about my travels.

Preamble: And you may suddenly find yourself / In the same bookstore every Saturday morning…

Everyone who reads this blog is probably sick to death of me complaining about how exhausting 2025 has been, but I felt – before, during and afterwards – that this trip was desperately needed. So virtually every time I’ve mentioned something negative about this year, if it hasn’t been mentioned explicitly, it’s been hard-coded with the message: “I need a holiday”. A holiday needed primarily because I’ve felt like I haven’t been anywhere for the past couple of years. Aside from monthly trips down to the Fleurieu I would find myself locked into a pattern of visiting the same bunch of Adelaide bookstores every single Saturday for what seems like forever. About midway through this year, as I was thumbing another science book that I’d be better off not adding to the growing ‘to read’ pile at home, I was struck by how much this routine was beginning to feel awfully existential. Michael Haneke Grade Existential. A haunting burgundy flag. Although I wasn’t weeping in carwashes or nihilistically flushing wads of cash down the toilet (see The Seventh Continent), I felt I really needed to break up this dull rhythm I’d found myself in lately. That’s why people have vacations I guess.

People also have holidays to get away from their countries and communities too. Needless to say, I have an incredibly fortunate and privileged existence. Bombs don’t rain down here, I don’t have to worry about being attacked in the street and water flows out of the taps. But with every acknowledgement of one’s own privilege there’s a dozen more folks who aren’t even acutely aware of their privilege and see fit to constantly complain that they’re not entitled enough. These kinds of Australians are intolerable and throughout 2025 I’d overheard my fair share of their grievances or had the misfortune to be caught up in a conversation with one or two of them this year. Obviously, travelling to the UK post-Brexit or a current iteration of Germany entertaining near-fascism wasn’t going to improve this outlook, but hey, at least it would be instances of the same kind of thing happening elsewhere.

Oh, I was bringing a handheld audio recorder with me (obviously) and I’d bought a fancy hardbound journal for the trip. Days out from departing, I agonised over which selection of nice pens I would take in my slender eco-friendly pencil case. Thankfully Lauren would remind me for the seventh time that I hadn’t chosen my clothes for the trip yet, so this helped expedite the pen choosing and I was able to pivot onto more important things. We got there in the end.

Scotland

I was excited to finally get to Scotland. My mum and brother’s exhaustive family history research had recently begun tracing strands of ancestry in and around the Not-England parts of the UK. It wasn’t comprehensive enough for me to go knocking on a stranger’s door or take rubbings of gravestones, but it certainly imbued impressions of places with a vague sense of connection and reverence. Even if this was mostly naive, and in some cases completely misplaced, it was a nice feeling. A couple of days away from our final stop in Scotland (Inverness) my brother reminded me via a text message that resembled a government announcement: “Remember: everyone in Inverness is basically your cousin.”

Edinburgh

With virtually no sleep to speak of on our 22-hour flight (broken up by a couple of hours layover in Doha), we had flown into Edinburgh just before dawn but somehow found the energy to explore the new and old parts of the city throughout the day. Weatherwise, it was all a bit unexpected. The conditions hovered around those suited to a temperate rainforest as veils of misty rain and muggy air followed us wherever we wandered. Two top layers of clothing seemed like the most comfortable option. If our trousers got damp, so be it.

There are a couple of Scottish words for this kind of weather that seemed appropriate: Smirr referring to a fine drizzle; and Dreich meaning dreary and dismal. I was confident enough there was Smirr falling over Edinburgh, but if I’d mused to a Scot, “Whoa, it’s all a bit Dreich today isn’t it?” they would have slapped me across the face and told me to get a grip. We spoke to a local at some point about the weather, as any tourist worth their salt on Day 1 should do, and they admitted that the mugginess and apparent lack of bracing cold was a bit unseasonal midway through the Scottish autumn.

Rather than muse on whether the Gulf Stream was on its way to collapse, we momentarily forgot about the climate apocalypse and allowed ourselves to be distracted and charmed by the obnoxious prettiness of Edinburgh and tramp its greasy cobbles. It’s telling that the most subjectively beautiful thing we saw on this day was not a cathedral or middle-aged guy playing bagpipes; no, it was a public library. On principle, here was an establishment you could walk into, spend hours in and – if you were a local – borrow a book or a movie to take home. What was this sinister – nay – woke antidote to late-stage capitalism, consumerism, enshittification and endless subscription plans? A lot of people have regarded 2025 as a ‘hinge year’ and depressingly world events have backed this theory up, but there’s nothing like a visit to a library to buck the trend, even if it’s for just an hour.

Edinburgh’s Central Library might be the loveliest library I’ve ever been in. It’s not necessarily fancy or modern; it’s just a good place. Its building is the 17th Century former home of Sir Thomas Hope. A couple of centuries later, long after Hope slipped off his mortal coil, everyone decided it might be a good idea to repurpose the old fossil’s former residence and establish the city’s first public library. I always have a hard time imagining how buildings as huge and vast as this one could have functioned as homes for individuals, but then again I have an equally hard time imagining how (and why) anyone could live in a six-bedroom home in an Adelaide suburbs.

Anyway, it’s a library now and that’s all that matters. Spread across several floors are separate areas for the usual fare (fiction/non-fiction), art and design, music and research periodicals. The Art and Design section, located in a section of the uppermost floor, was my pick of the bunch. Illuminated almost entirely by a skylight, books on painting, drawing, architecture, photography, mixed-media filled the heaving bookshelves. In the centre of the space and in a couple of corners were artworks and various implements from recent workshops and work in progress. Very quiet and peaceful all over, but the intermediate spaces were also quite interesting. In one of the stairwells that connects the floors I heard a drone and singing coming from a room marked, funnily enough, the ‘Music Room’. Beyond the closed door, the drone sounded like a strung instrument (possibly a tambura) and the singing resembling an Indian chant, raga or something similar. The music would intermittently halt, with a slow patient voice intoning. From the reverberant vantage of the stairwell, these audible wisps elegantly diffused into the space as natural light filtered in from above.

The tolerably dismal weather persisted into the next couple of days in Edinburgh. Dare I say it skirted the definition of Dreich. On our second day we walked along the Water of Leith, a waterway that runs through the northern parts of the city. Everything was dripping wet and the water rocketed along in spate, alternating between a ‘gentle watery murmur’ and ‘harsh radio static’ profile. I’d been recording our walk along the way and as we approached a huge bridge I noticed a busker at the foot of one of the long support columns that shot upwards into a graceful arch.

The busker introduced themselves as Theo, and they were in the process of packing up their gear. Theo mentioned that this is their favourite spot along the river, since the acoustics of the arch enhance the projection and resonance of their tenor saxophone. I mentioned that it was a shame that I’d missed his set, but then without hesitation Theo unpacked and reassembled the sax to play a piece so that I could get an impression of how this sounded in situ.

I primed my recorder, leaning against a railing and facing Theo about ten metres from his spot near the arch. Against the bright roar of the river’s cascade, the sax’s supple tones bloomed into the air, wobbled, drifted and rolled across the interior of the arch. Given the roaring of the cascade, it was at times tricky to discern the resonance of certain tones, but the overall effect was exquisite, fleetingly joined by the immediate patter of footsteps in puddles, the passing of bicycles and stray voices. After the performance, which Theo said was an interpretation of the tradition folk tune “Skye Boat Song”, we exchanged details and I mentioned that I might use some of recording for my new album. At the time of writing I’m currently incorporating Theo’s performance into the draft of a new track called “The Search”.

Storm Amy, cars, high anxiety and moments of respite

Prior to Scotland, I hadn’t driven in a foreign country before so I had some minor reservations about hiring a car for the next few days and getting accustomed to the roads leading into the Highlands. But given that everyone drives on the left-hand side of the road in the UK (as in Australia), what was there to possibly be concerned about? After all, I wasn’t driving through Rome or a demilitarised zone. Prior to our arrival I’d done what I thought was a responsible amount of familiarisation with expected roadsigns, how to properly exit roundabouts and priming myself for the multitude of single-lane roads in the Highlands. What I hadn’t anticipated was that on the day we were leaving Edinburgh we would be driving through the onset of an ex-hurricane that was bearing down on the country over the next 24 hours.

It wasn’t as terrifying as that sounds, but it did mean that we ended up driving through a shitload of rain that started as we left Edinburgh, passed Queensferry and got heavier as we abandoned attempts to visit some of the waterside towns (Ro’ Ness, Grangemouth) that reside along the waterline of the Firth of Forth. I should mention as well that I was also at the wheel of a brand new Mercedes SLA 180, with an intimidatingly powerful engine, a dashboard resembling that of a spacecraft and no ‘proper’ handbrake or gearshift. As we were leaving Edinburgh, I questioned out aloud why on Earth a respectable hire car company would offer up a car like this to a foreigner. But then I remembered the excess and other things we were obligated to fork out in the event of a sizeable scratch, dent or prang and effectively answered my own question: “You know exactly why they gave you this car, you dumb Aussie. They expect you to prang it.” Surely it’s not evil if it’s part of their business model. Surely?

Several times when attempting to adjust the windscreen wipers I found myself inadvertently downshifting and high-revving, embodying the archetype of a clueless middle-aged tourist in a luxury car driving through depressed waterside communities. There was also the problem of how to turn up the volume on the voice of the GPS, which would present some problems over the half hour of driving to come. How was I to know that one of the few traditional things left in this future car was a physical car manual? If I hadn’t been so dazzled and freaked out by the alien interior of the car when we picked it up in the garage I would have checked for a manual. Lauren would dig this out of the glovebox on the last day we had the car. On that occasion we took full advantage of the heated seats we didn’t know we had available to us, in spite of the fact it was an unseasonably mild day.

That bloody GPS. Roundabouts not only were bigger than expected, but they were constructed on winding slopes with entire forests planted in the middle of them. Lorries barrelled around at high speed, we missed a couple of exits and before long we were driving through even-heavier-rain that would occasionally come in sideways on a five-lane motorway. We were also now heading in the wrong direction towards Glasgow. Cars and trucks zipped past us on either side with a visibility of a couple of arm lengths. A big part of the problem was that we couldn’t hear the GPS voice over the pummelling of the rain as well as the long-standing issue of Lauren being terrible at interpreting maps. Around this point I started making weird sounds and my smart watch vibrated and reminded me that I was experiencing moments of heightened stress.

The last time I panic-moaned like this in a car was about 20 years earlier when my girlfriend at the time and I escaped an increasingly feral party in Melbourne, borrowed a friend’s car to drive a short distance back to Northcote. But we took a wrong turn (moan), slid onto a freeway (moan) and ended up on the outskirts of a national park (MOAN.) Then we realised there was next to no fuel in the car (MOAN!) Miraculously, we found a battered street directory in the back of the car buried under a layer of filthy blankets smothered in brake fluid. Thankfully we didn’t need these oily rags to power our way back to Northcote, but we were definitely relying on fumes in the tank by that point. This experience didn’t necessarily build character, but from that point on it did incline me to ask people in advance what kind of party it is that I’m going to.

Enough about cars. By the time we’d righted ourselves and were headed in the right direction, Lauren suggested that we stop somewhere to decompress, deconstruct and decompose our tangled nerves. Our accommodation for the night was out to the west in Perthshire, so a mid-way stop in the little town of Doune (pronounced doon) seemed ideal.

The weather in Doune was positively Dreich with a big capital D, and if any local took umbrage with this characterisation I’d be the one doing the slapping. It was positively bleak and yes, I was a bit strung out. Sheltered in a small cosy cafe, I chomped down my scones and slammed back cups of tea like someone who had narrowly escaped a Highland ambush. How apt then that we should then pop into the town’s visitor centre where a volunteer proudly showed us an impressive display of ornate 16th Century pistols. They also recommended that we drive a short way down the road to the Doune Ponds.

The Doune Ponds are a wetland consisting of several lakes and woodland restoration that had been restored on the former site of a gravel quarry back in the 1970s. Given that the weather was still pretty atrocious, we basically had the place to ourselves. Donned in our Gortex jackets and waterproof shoes we braved the conditions, tramping through the squelchy greenness. When the rain intensified we sheltered in a birdhide overlooking the largest of the lakes where coots, swans and herons could be sighted drifting imperviously on the water. I set up the recorder and ended up with a nice document of what it sounded like here: fat drops of water whacking the roof of our shelter, as a wider relief of rain pattered over the lake and surrounding trees.

We arrived at our accomodation later that afternoon in the tiny village of Gartmore, holed up in the top floor of an old pub as the storm intensified. A massive pot pie with chips and two enormous pints of bitter had never tasted better. We’d been informed by the barkeeper that it was likely that the power might go out during the night. Sure enough, the lights winked out around 10pm as I was in bed writing in my journal. They would come back on moments later, followed by a boisterous cheer from locals in the bar down below.

The following morning we made our way north to the town of Aberfoyle to do some nature walks. We counted ourselves as fortunate since we were able to get there on the one connecting road that wasn’t completely inundated. All around us, paddocks were sheathed in water and could be mistaken for a loch that wasn’t on the map. Rivers had burst their banks and we held our breath a couple of times as we drove through planes of water covering a dip in the road which we hoped didn’t have a huge branch submerged in it. Our hikes that morning around Aberfoyle were wonderful. I would later learn that this part of Perthshhire (close to Loch Lomond) sits in an oceanic hygrothermic (i.e. really wet) climate, suited to temperate rainforest 1. Whilst regions like Argyle, Oban, Islay further to the west are much more hygrothermic, on our walks we saw telltale traces and hints of near-rainforest with various lichens and fungi growing on, out of and draped from surrounding trees and vegetation. From a soundscape vantage, it was quintessentially moist ambience: dripping, sloshing and trickling with the odd bit of discrete avian twittering and susurration through ash, oak, birch and pine trees.

1. A week later, the one book I purchased at the London Review of Books bookstore was Guy Shrubsole’s The Lost Rainforests of Britain. ︎

Into the Highlands

From here, we doubled back in a westerly direction towards Perth and then headed north on the A9 to Pitlochry where we would stay for a night before venturing into the Highlands proper. The storm was behind us by now, but its influence lingered in places with trees down as well as passages of flooded road that we rolled the dice on a few more times. Pitlochry, whilst not entirely unpleasant, was a bit of a jolt compared to the relative humbleness of Gartmore and little towns we stopped by. Pitlochry resembled a tourist haunt; haunted with suntanned hiking-bros, potential oligarchs and a grab bag of horrible rich tourists.

These ghouls marauded the main strip of town, openly complaining within earshot about having to drive on the wrong side of the road or that they couldn’t find Dubai chocolate in a convenience store. Their uncanny faces: a mostly deadened visage, yet showing discrete signs of animation from a combination of insane wealth and militant levels of entitlement. The eternal paradox of the uber-rich: they look like they own the place but appear utterly bored by it at the same time. It all felt very much like the exposition of JG Ballard story. A good thing we were just staying the night.

So Pitlochry is probably a place I won’t ever visit again, but the following morning was pleasant since we saw red squirrels for the first time near our hotel! More of these delightful creatures would await us in the days to come, reaching the point where by week’s end, we were almost sick of seeing red squirrels.

We were also sick of seeing (and hearing) rich people, so we were a bit depressed that our next stop in the heart of the Caingorms, Braemar had been blighted by torrents of money and the ridiculous expectations of millionaires. Still, for our couple of days in Braemar we had the protective bubble of a humble B&B owned by a husband and wife.

By this point, we were about five days into travelling and my brain had begun to indulge in unfettered, lateral observations; some useful, the rest completely unnecessary. A case of the latter occurred over our first breakfast at the B&B where I became convinced that Dave the owner looked like the spitting image of actor Martin Clunes and Dire Straits frontman, Mark Knopfler. Even more remarkable was the fact that Dave sounded exactly like Mark Knopfler with his humble, matter-of-factly, Geordie Lad patter. I found this delightful and fascinating, but didn’t know quite what to do with this insight beyond scrutinising Dave more than I probably should have been. As I munched on toast deep in thought thinking about Dave, Lauren – perhaps gauging that I was ruminating on meaningless things – suggested that we go for a hike after breakfast.

As beautiful as a big hill in the Scottish Highlands is, festooned with heather, boulders and lichens, there’s not a great deal to listen out for, especially when you reach the summit. The top of Craig Choinnich which overlooked Braemar was virtually soundless, aside from the wind whirling around the ears and shearing through small pine trees. The odd twittering from a bird might be heard, but the area seemed so overwhelmed by the surrounding absence of anything else that any minor sound was perceptually negligible.

We ambled back down from the summit and wove our way past a bunch of pine trees rocking in the wind and creaking audibly. Proving to myself and Lauren that my travel-brain wasn’t geared towards completely unnecessary thoughts, I formulated an idea for recording these creaks but with the aim of documenting both the localised creaking and the surrounding wispy ambience. I positioned the recorder at the base of one of the pines, leaning it so that the microphone pair (within the wind protector) came into direct contact with the trunk. Monitoring this through the headphones, I listened for a while to ensure that a loud creak wouldn’t clip the input level. Sure enough, it was striking a nice balance between the immediate vibrations of the pine creaking and the spatial swirliness of the wind across the wider area. An absolute cracker of a recording and one that I might consider submitting for this year’s Sound Of The Year Awards.

Feeling the Burn (O’ Vat)

After a couple of days in Braemar it was time to hit the road and head further north towards Inverness, where we would be staying in a woodland cottage in a rural district. Given we had a full day ahead of us, we made a couple of stops along the way. The first stop would pull us eastwards past Balmoral and in the direction of Aberdeen. A few miles from Balmoral was the Muir Of Dinnet National Park, featuring the geological wonder of the Burn O’ Vat.

The Burn O’ Vat consists of the upper and lower course of a stream (the Vat Burn) that runs through a geological formation consisting of rocks and boulders. What makes this formation unique is the huge bowl-shaped pothole that the upper course of the Van Burn plunges into from its southern end. From a small waterfall, the water then disperses out across a substrate of sandy loam in the bowl and then accumulates into a stream forming its lower course.

How did this strange place come into being? Back in the Late Pleistocene epoch (about 16,000 years ago), the Muir of Dinnet was covered by a glacial ice sheet. As this ice began to melt a few thousand years later, the meltwater carried a bunch of debris that had been locked up in the ice. It’s believed that the debris got lodged in one place for a long time, causing the glacial bed underneath to erode and get hollowed out over time, in effect creating a huge bowl-shaped pothole.

By the time we arrived at the car park a Smirr-esque light misty rain was beginning to settle across the area. Much like the previous few days, it wasn’t cold but this seemingly innocuous wet stuff in the air had the knack of soaking you through if stood in one place for too long. However, this wasn’t really much of an inconvenience at all since it enhanced the impression of the park as being something close to a temperate rainforest ecosystem, especially around the Vat itself.

The loamy base of the Vat was a rich brown and coarse with small pebbles and sand. Shallow pools of water from the rain and upper stream had accumulated in interconnected pools and small streams with the slightest impression of being in motion. Overhead, light rain fell and water dripped from the outcropped sides of the Vat. Beneath these outcrops were concave areas in the rock previously worn away. Within these sheltered areas, sound rippled and reflected across the smooth, slimy surfaces.

Speaking of sounds, the little waterfall was certainly not diminutive in terms of acoustic prowess. A persistent cascade tumbled from the upper course above and splashed into a pool below. No doubt enhanced by the reverberant properties of the Vat’s interior, the waterfall’s roar encompassed the space in a big noisy lather. I walked around the open area and along the concave interiors, closely listening for reflections and pockets of resonance. Still, the waterfall didn’t overwhelm the soundscape as a balance could be heard between the roughness of the cascade, the delicate rap of dripping water and the distant chirp of birds nearby.

I made several recordings in and around the Vat with my stereo recorder. This is one of the few times on the trip I regretted not bringing along my portable ambisonic recorder, as the unique spatial character of the Vat would have been a bit more faithfully rendered as a binaural or multi-channel recording. Ah well. I did have a nice conversation with a trio of ecologists visiting from Aberdeen. A chat about ecology and soundscapes is always going to go well when one of them approaches you and enthusiastically asks, “Are you recording the ambient noises?”

Woodland bound

From our visit to the Vat we resumed our drive northwards into the upper elevations of of The Highlands. We had left the whatever light rain was lingering behind us, although a heavy set of cloud and high altitude mist became the norm. The light darkened as trees rapidly became nonexistent as we followed a winding road climbing between brown hills speckled with rock and purple heather. From a lookout at Corgarff and surveying our approach from the east, the ground slid away and stretched out; meeting a horizon consisting of a distant undulating landscape in deep blue set against a hazy glare. Around us, an infinitude of grey. The boundary between cloud and mist shifted imperceptibly, drifting glacially across the tops of hills. Coming from the dripping loveliness of the Vat, this was a good day for encounters with quintessentially Scottish weather conditions that possessed the effect of making the present moment seem irrelevant and reprojecting your atomic speck of consciousness onto a vast, inconceivable continuum of cosmic time. However, it was now 2pm and we hadn’t had any lunch, so this quickly pulled us back into the present speck-time. The convenience of a public toilet would be handy as well.

Tourist haunts fell away as we wound down and through Speyside country. Here the roadsigns were bilingual in both English and Scottish Gallic and the towns were a bit less accommodating to the want of tourists. What this meant was that you were less likely to find a place that would serve you some vegetarian soup at 3pm, and I admit we had probably become a little too conditioned to convenience. But we weren’t going to tear down the place because we couldn’t find a matcha latte, unlike some other tourists. Grantown-On-Spey was a ‘normal’ town, populated with normal people. We visited a cafe and then stocked up on a couple of days of groceries for our stay in the woodland cottage southeast of Inverness.

Much like the convenience of decent food, it’s amazing how quickly you get used to things. The same went for the car I’d been driving these past few days. By now I was at ease with the CLA 180’s futuristic dashboard, the absence of a proper handbrake and the light kick in my kidneys when its formidable engine surged into action. In other words, I felt comfortably in control of this vehicle. But how quickly we can also be lulled into a sense of unassailability. We hadn’t yet tackled any narrow single-lane country roads.

We were a good hour from our destination, and despite what the sat nav provided as a route, there was nothing to suggest how challenging this passage would be for an antipodean driver like me. In Australia, we have it pretty easy when it comes to roads. Owing to the fact that Australia is huge (much like the USA) roads can as big as they want to be. Sure, you occasionally encounter crappy, pot-filled dirt roads here and there, but there’s almost always a place to pull over when a massive tractor is bearing down upon you. You might end up in a ditch; but a ditch has space, unlike a gnarly stone wall covered in blackberry brambles.

“That sounded like a scratch…” is not a thing you want to hear from your partner as you very slowly edge into a Passing Place to allow a big vehicle to pass in the opposite direction. Thankfully, the sound of external things making contact with a car often sound much bigger and scarier than they actually are. It’s a bit like feeling around in your mouth with your tongue apprehensively after heartily chomping on a dry cracker that might have, but probably didn’t chip a tooth.

The slower-than-usual speed of travel allowed us to absorb the surrounding backroad country as the late afternoon sunlight slid across roadside homesteads, small paddocks and groves of ash, oak and birch trees. Maybe that driving confidence was gradually coming back to me as well. “Single lane bit of road, across an 800-year old bridge, just before that hairpin corner? Hrmrmrmmhnng…ok.” Indeed, the cottage was edging closer, represented by a chequered flag on the sat nav. The peaks of coniferous pine plantations materialised over a shallow hill. One more turn here and, oh…the road is closed.

The closed road passed through a small section of pine forest. 250 metres of it. The cottage was on the other side. We idled in the car for a couple of minutes as I mulled over the prospect of having to double back the way we came and then take a long-winded alternate route to the destination. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so helpless looking at an arrow on a screen, stalled on a blue line that it can’t follow to its destination.

I was about to turn us back around when an SUV, actively defying what the road sign meant, emerged from the forest. A woman driving the car (presumably a local) leaned out of her window and asked if we were lost. Probably sounding a bit panicked I stammered something about how our accomodation was on the other side of the forest and I really, really didn’t want to go back the way we came. With a scrutinising eye, she glanced over our car and said, “Ah…yeah, love. Look it’s technically closed because a bunch of trees came down from the recent storm, but they’ve cleared the bulk of them…but there’s, um…still a few…overhead. Watch that.”

I didn’t know a collision sensor in a car could be triggered from things above you, but there you go. It makes sense. The initial approach along the forest road seemed innocuous enough, then at about fifty metres the carnage became apparent as huge trunks that had fallen across the road had been gouged away with industrial-grade chainsaws, leaving a convenient space for us to pass through. An aroma of intense pine freshness rapidly flooded the cabin of the car. Against the waning afternoon light, tall pines teetered groggily at angles ranging from slightly-normal to not-normal. The less fortunate ones (definitely-not-normal) lay unevenly over the road a couple of metres overhead, setting off the sensor with a succession of anxious beeps. Thankfully, maintaining a straight line was all that was required as we approached the end of the forest road. A pair of witches cones lie ahead on either side of the road, followed by bright sunshine and patches of blue sky. It wasn’t exactly the finishing line, but it was close. The cottage was a turn to the right and the chequered flag awaited.

* * *

That seems like an appropriate place to leave this travelogue for now. If you’ve read this far, imagine you’ve reached a pair of proverbial witches cones. The benefits of this checkpoint are a two-day stay in a woodland cottage about ten miles southeast of Inverness. I’ll pick things up again next month for a couple more days in Scotland and a week in England.

When I’m a bit older and I reflect on 2025, I might enter the vault of this blog, locate the few slabs representing 2025, squint at the scrawls and various images representing my creative activities and think to myself, “Hmm..that was a bit of a strange year.” Writing from this current vantage, some two-thirds of the way through the year, where I’ve been keeping drafts for monthly updates that get put off and then compound themselves into bi-monthly – and now tri-monthly updates – I can say without any doubt that this has been an exhausting year.

But unlike previous exhaustive years where so much of my energy goes into taking on one-too-many creative projects on, this year has been an exception. Sure, there’s been things happening here and there, but it hasn’t been non-stop. If anything, my creative activities have seemed to operate in a fairly ordered Gannt-like harmony, with big blocks of time allocated, nominal downtime and very little overlap.

As boring as it is to admit, the problem has been ‘work’. The category of ‘work’ that keeps bills and a mortgage paid. It’s a thing that has consistently devoured much of my mental energy this year, but thankfully that beast is tamed (or whatever metaphor is more appropriate) and I can – hope to – get things operating with a bit more consistency again. Like this blog!

So, here’s a summary of activities from the 2025 winter period (June, July August)

Black Squeaker Project

My involvement on the Black Squeaker Project continued over the winter months, with a couple more field trips out to Anstey Hill Reserve to make some attended field recordings and deploy a pair of AudioMoths for long-term observations. During these activities, my role in the project was still a little undefined but gradually it became clearer that I would be providing two sound-based components for the realisation of the work in November 2025.

The first of these components will be a six-to-eight minute soundscape composition that will be broadcast throughout the Elder Hall performance venue as composer and organist Carlo Forlivesi performs. For this soundscape composition – which I’ve been developing over the past month – I’ve derived most of the material from my field trips to Anstey Hill, with a combination of attended field recordings and AudioMoth audio recordings. This soundscape needs to be fairly discrete and sound akin to a diffuse atmosphere that gives an impression of place, but isn’t too intrusive or distracting. I’m looking to finalise this composition in the next couple of weeks.

The other contribution will be a selection of ‘one-shot’ sounds that Carlo will be able to trigger during the performance with foot pedals. For these sounds, I’m drawing on bird calls, natural sounds (wind, rain, creeks) and of course the star of the show – the Black Squeaker cicada.

I’m really looking forward to witnessing the full realisation of the work in November, complete with Carlo’s organ, Fabio Rambelli’s shō with and projected visualisations by Lawrence Walker.

Wrangling In The Antipodes

A fairly dormant area of my practice has been the data science and acoustic ecology blog I started in 2021. When the Black Squeaker Project kicked off earlier in the year, I had been talking to the rest of the team about methods for summarising large batches of acoustic data using approaches like acoustic indices, event detection and compressing timescales. This led me back to my data science toolkit and I thought it would be a good idea to familiarise myself with Python’s scikit-maad package, which specialises in working with soundscape data.

The first of my scikit-maad explorations is a use case for generating circadean soundscapes from AudioMoth data. I’m intending to explore scikit-maad more in the coming months.

Self Noise Revisited

At the beginning of August my 2024 installation work, Self Noise returned – for one night only!

In one of the vocal booths at Adelaide Interim Studios, attendees could enter in groups of up to 3, close the door behind them and experience Self Noise in a scaled-down and reimagined format. The occasion was an event coordinated by musician, teacher and artist, Thea Martin (aka Short Snarl) for the launch of their new EP called…Self Noise.

In April 2024 when my installation work was being exhibited at Neoterica, Thea had visited and been particularly taken with my work, which led to them to consider the underlying themes of the work, later extrapolating the term ‘self noise’ and apply it to aspects of the human self and the states that we inhabit. About a month after Neoterica had finished and the work had been deinstalled, I met Thea for the first time through a reading group that they were facilitating. I few sessions went by, and then during a group discussion I mentioned Self Noise and Thea lit up and realised that I was the artist behind the work.

About a year later, Thea was finalising the Self Noise EP and mentioned that they would like to feature my installation work at the launch. Given it would be for just one night and with a limited time window to load in, set up and bump out, a reimagining of this work was in the order. Aside from the infrastructure driving multiple audio channels, I realised that the work’s original sculptural component – consisting of painted MDF with transducers fixed to the undersides – wasn’t going to work, let along fit inside one of the recording booths!

When I was in the latter stages of developing the original version of Self Noise in early 2024, I had been looking to incorporate some sort of discrete video component but didn’t have the time or a practical approach for it. At the time I imagined something that would sit within the sculpture and emit a dappled light on its underside, a bit like how light hits water in semi-concealed rock pools. Obviously I couldn’t replicate this for the new version, but this consideration of a video component definitely informed how the rest of the reworking of Self Noise came together.

In the original work, the sculptural component served multiple functions, but above all it was considered a focal point for the observer – both visually and audibly – and to also function as a counter balance to the peripheral soundscape that encompassed the space. So for this updated version I wanted to achieve a similar effect, albeit with different materials. After some experimentation, I made a short video that would loop on an iPad. The iPad would be positioned facing upwards on the floor of the recording booth.

My intention with the video component was to evoke something from an environment but not be too exact as to its origin or allude to a particular place. Using archived video recordings, I processed these using Da Vinci Resolve until I landed with something that was uncanny and open to interpretation. It was also important that it wasn’t too ‘animate’ so as to suggest a particular behaviour. In most instances the clips were near static, with additional animations added to them to make seem like they were slowly drifting, swirling or pulsing.

Here’s a selection of the static images I worked with before further processing:

Since this component was to be considered the focal point of the work, I wanted the sound to come directly form the source – the iPad. I gave some consideration to building a box to house the iPad in, with the audio output sent to a small amp and speakers, but then I realised that the iPad’s built-in speakers would be more than sufficient. In order to not make the iPad appear simply as an iPad, I positioned a sheet of black-tinted glass over the iPad which subdued some of the harsh brightness of the screen, whilst also lending some solidity and visual weight.

For the peripheral sound component, this was almost identical to the original’s set up, but scaled down to two speakers and not positioned at right angles to each other. Given the peculiar shape of the recording booth, I had to experiment with speaker placement to achieve the most balanced result. One speaker would be placed between some acoustic baffles, and the other underneath a piano stool near the door.

Here’s a short video documenting the installation:

Audio outputs Iron Winter LP

Adelaide composer Luke Altmann has released his soundtrack for the new film, Iron Winter. The soundtrack features music created exclusively with a noisebox that I built for Luke last year.

Live album – Borrowed From This Time

I’ve released a live recording from the album launch of Borrowed Out Of Time which was held at Wizard Tone Studios in November 2024. It was recorded by the studio’s in-house engineer James Brown. The solo performance was intended as a ‘live extrapolation’ of the album, and James’ recording beautifully captures the atmosphere of the Wizard Tone space.

Depthcharge compilation

The closing track from Borrowed Out Of Time (“Eternal Exposure”) has been featured on Adelaide’s Three D Radio yearly compilation Depthcharge. The crew at Three D have been amazingly supportive of this album over the past year, featuring all of the album’s tracks across several programs. Though the compilation is only available to subscribers of the station, it’s worth a shoutout to support your independent radio stations – wherever you might be!

Essay incoming (or more precisely – some more writing)

Over winter I’ve been coming and going with new writing projects. At present several drafts exist in various states. There may be a fresh essay before the year is out, but I’m certain there will be more consistent writing output in 2026 since this is something I really want to spend more time with in the new year.

Soundmap update…soon

The other conspicuously dormant area of activity this year has been updates to the Fleurieu and Kangaroo Island Sound Map. I can confirm that there will be an update happening this year, but it might not be until November and December. Currently there’s about a ten new recordings from the past 12 months that will end up on the map and I’m looking forward to getting these live before the year winds up. There’s also a couple of site maintenance tasks which I’ll be looking to resolve as well.

See you again…soon-ish

Given that I’ve got a much-needed vacation coming up, it’s very likely that the next blog update will resemble a seasonal edition covering the Spring/Autumn.

Following a necessary pause last month, Here’s a round up of what I got up to during April and May.

Stygofauna, mysterious soundscapes & the extended dry

Back in February 2025, I started collaborating with an evolutionary biologist, Remko Leijs, whose areas of knowledge extend to the newly discovered realm of stygofauna. You can read a comprehensive overview of what we got up to in the previous blog post here.

Following this work, there was a bit of a pause and then in late April we made plans to head out to Langhorne Creek to examine a couple of deep boreholes on the outskirts of the township. Langhorne Creek is a regional district that is near to the larger locality of Strathalbyn, consisting of pastoral country and vineyards. The Bremer River runs through the greater area, with its course passing through Langhorne Creek. However, the river itself has been completely dry at Langhorne Creek for some time and these arid conditions extended far and wide across the region.

Big dry

South Australia has been enduring one of its driest starts to a year, comparable with droughts throughout the 1980s, but the period from February 2024 to May 2025 has represented the longest period of consecutive rainfall deficiencies in large areas of the state since records began.

This much was evident as we drove along the Princess Highway past the Adelaide Hills towns of Stirling, Bridgewater and Hahndorf, noticing successive clusters of dead native trees and shrubs. As vegetation grew sparser on the road towards Mount Barker the landscape shifted dramatically where the hills and paddocks had been reduced to plains of red dust with gnarled outcrops of rock protruding.

By the time we had left the highway and were driving towards Strathalbyn and Langhorne Creek, the landscape was completely arid. Everywhere. Miraculously, there was water in a section of the Bremer River when we passed over a bridge, but successive passes over the river revealed less and less water until we reached our destination.

Deep bores

After checking the GPS data on his phone, Remko found our exact destination on a dirt road a few hundred metres outside of the Langhorne Creek township. There were two visible boreholes located on a shallow rise by the roadside, separated by about fifty metres. On the opposite side of the road was a parched grazing paddock with cattle sheltering beneath an old red-gum. Even though this was mid-Autumn, it was expected that the temperature would peak at about 28C and by 11am, the air was considerably dry with a considerable punch of heat from the sun. In stark contrast to the grazing paddock, the other side of the road consisted of huge paddocks filled with lush green crops and massive irrigators.

The bores consisted of a rusted iron cylinder of about 20cm in diameter and raised about a metre from the ground level. A heavy metal cover could be easily lifted off the cylinder and provide a glimpse into the depths of the bore. Remko estimated that this bore was about a hundred metres deep, which was significantly deeper than the 20 metre bore we’d previously examined back in February. Given the severe dry conditions affecting the area, Remko suspected that the groundwater levels would be lower than usual. I’d brought along a 9-metre Aquarian hydrophone along with additional length of XLR cable to extend the drop of the microphone. However, I only had enough cable to extend to about 40 metres.

Thankfully this was more than enough length to reach the surface of the water column, which we measured at about 18-19 metres and then continued going deeper.

Strange overtones

As I’d noted back in February, it was a novel experience to be dropping a microphone into a realm where it’s difficult to anticipate or imagine what will be encountered. There are of course similarities here to placing hydrophones in opaque bodies of water or attaching a contact mic to a resonating body, but I would argue that the distinction here is that there is still a degree of connection to where the mic is and what I am observing – both audibly and visually. It gets more difficult to read perceptual cues when a mic is being lowered many metres below ground into a borehole – a subterranean column of air, water and sediment.

Which brings us to the sounds that we heard – and what weird sounds there were! I’ve included one of the recordings in the embed below.

To be clear: a month on, Remko, myself and those I’ve shared the recordings with are not entirely sure of what we’re listening to. There are identifiable sounds, such as the wind shearing around and across the cylinder and resulting booms of resonance. Things get stranger once we breach the surface of the water and explore the depths below. In the recording below you’ll hear the wind and its resonance prominently, but it’s what sounds like water circulating and coursing through the water column has provoked the most curiosity and debate.

What’s particularly odd about this sound is that Remko was adamant that this couldn’t possibly be the circulation of water, since water does not travel this quickly through sedimentary aquifer systems; rather it moves very slowly. Additionally, although this sound is initially very prominent, it gradually diminishes over the next two minutes. And whenever the hydrophone was lowered further, this sound would materialise again, before dropping away again.

So what could it be? Remko suspected that this could be sediment (both natural particles and granules of rust) in the water column being disrupted by the presence of the hydrophone. Whilst this was certainly plausible, I argued that the subtle overtones produced by this sound – as evidenced in the spectrogram below – couldn’t isolate the sound to sediment alone and that something else was likely at play. Let me try to unpack my theory further. Assuming that this was sediment making contact with the microphone, this would be direct contact with the microphone and wouldn’t result in the overtones that we can see in the spectrogram, which clearly align with the sound’s initial prominence and gradual diminishing over the next two minutes. Those overtones in the spectrogram are consistent with the overtones produced by the wind resonance, which potentially means that the mystery sound is being propagated within the water column itself, not through direct contact with the microphone.

What is this sound? We simply don’t know and more explorations at the site – such as deploying an AudioMoth – would be ideal.

What about the stygofauna?

Now you might be wondering: “Well, that’s all well and good, but a) did you find any stygofauna? and; b) did it make any sound?”. Well, we think we did find some stygofauna. As I was recording the second borehole with the hydrophone, Remko set about taking samples with his net at the first bore. He showed me a sample in a little specimen tube. Amongst a decent amount of natural and rusty sediment, there were the most discrete flickers of life in the narrow column of water as a tiny, mostly-transparent presence seemed flick itself out of the sediment, only to disappear again. It couldn’t have been more than a millimetre in size and it was difficult to determine whether it was a shrimp, a worm or something else.

And the sound? As you can probably tell by the previous recording, beneath the layers of wind resonance and our mystery sounds, there are little flutters of activity that could be identified as something else. In a recording from the second bore hole (which I’m still in the process of carefully analysing) there was a bit more of discrete activity that could be separated from the more dominant sounds, but it’s pretty inconclusive at this stage. If it is the tiny stygofauna at work, then it’s simply the sound of it moving around dense clusters of waterborne sediment and occasionally making contact with the highly sensitive hydrophone.

More fieldwork is required and I’m especially keen to return to this site. At the time of writing this post, the dry appears to have been partially broken with the arrival of decent rain for the first time in nearly a year.

Black Squeaker Project

For the past couple of months, I’ve been part of a research team for the Black Squeaker Project. There’s so much to cover, so for this post I’ll provide an overview of what this project is, how I’m involved and what I’m currently doing.

Led by the University of Adelaide’s Dr. Daniel Pitman, “the Black Squeaker Project is a sonic arts ensemble working at the intersection at the intersection of music, immersive technology and environmental ecology to celebrate the soundscapes of South Australia. Focusing on Atrapsalta audax – the Adelaide Black Squeaker, a newly identified cicada species that is native to the Adelaide Hills and Kangaroo Island – the project honours a creature rarely seen but sonorously embedded in South Australia’s summer soundscape.”

The project will come together later in 2025 with an immersive spatial concert at the University of Adelaide’s Elder Hall that will will merge ecological discovery, international collaborators and sonic art. Along with myself and Daniel, the core team also includes Laurence Walker, an interactive sound and media artist who is currently undertaking an Honours project at the university. Along with the core team, two international guests are participating as composer/performers for the event – the acclaimed organist and composer Prof. Carlo Forlivesi (Université Côte d’Azur), and Prof. Fabio Rambelli (University of California, Santa Barbara), a master performer of the shō, a traditional Japanese mouth organ.

Sounds interesting, doesn’t it?

Atrapsalta audax – the Black Squeaker cicada

Although the sharp pitched trill of the Black Squeaker has been a familiar soundscape amongst communities of the Adelaide Hills and the Fleurieu Peninsula, it was only formally described in 2024, following a beautiful photograph taken by Francis Forlivesi (Carlo’s son) in Mount Billy Conservation Park south of Adelaide. And whilst novel to Western science, the Black Squeaker has been known amongst the First Nations people of the Adelaide Plains and Fleurieu for centuries.

You can hear a recording made by Francis in the iNaturalist submission here.

Anstey Hill fieldwork

I was brought into the fold of this project back in April to conduct some fieldwork and make recordings in the Anstey Hill Recreation Park, a nature reserve tucked away in the foothills of North Eastern Adelaide. According to Dan, who lives close to this reserve, the Black Squeaker has a significant presence during the Spring and – depending on rainfall into early Summer – can still be heard up to January and February. But with the cicadas dormant until October, it does beg the question of what I can possibly achieve through fieldwork during this interim period?

The team’s made it clear that gaining an insight into the ambient soundscape of this environment – even in lieu of the cicadas – will help inform the direction of the finalised work, especially in the case of Carlo and Fabio who are based overseas. I was also uncertain of how the present and upcoming soundscapes of the autumn and winter periods would be of much benefit, but once I began considering other factors associated with acoustic ecology, this seemed like a worthwhile activity.

The factors are largely associated with assessing the balance between three primary categories of the soundscape – biophony (sounds produced by non-human agents), geophony (sounds of Earth systems) and anthropophony (sound produced by, or the byproducts of human agency.) Again the present and upcoming seasons are critical to the balance of these categories over a given period of observation – and are obviously very different to a Spring and Summer soundscape – but already the team have found this informative in terms of developing further research and attaching poetic meaning to the project.

To date, there have been two key fieldwork activities – standalone, attended field recordings; and AudioMoth deployment to observe the environment over extended, unattended periods. I’ve since collected one AudioMoth deployment and I’ll be looking to deploy simultaneous recorders around Anstey Hill in the weeks to come. I’ve previously worked with large sets of data collected with AudioMoths, and for this project I’ve been using hours of audio to produce time-compressed ‘circadian soundscapes’ to aid insights into the daily 24-hour cycle of the soundscape – observing key events, continuities, patterns and transitions.

The circadean soundscape approach is like creating a time-lapse version of events, where a sample (often a few seconds) is taken from each audio file and then rearranged as a continuous file. When displayed in a spectrogram, this provides a useful snapshot of a soundscape’s attributes, especially when evaluating the balance between the three primary categories of the soundscape – biophony, geophony and anthropophony.

Along with these field work activities, I’ve been obtaining additional cicada recordings from iNaturalist contributors and cleaning the audio up, whilst also maintaining metadata, visualisations and documentation for the audio compiled to date. As you can probably imagine, this particular activity is rather time-intensive!

In the next couple of months I’ll have much more to share about this project.

Folk season

And now for something rather different.

One of the reasons for a pause on the monthly blog posts was necessitated by needing a bit of a break from everything. Coupled with the change of season here in Adelaide and a (hopefully temporary) disruption to my work role, I was approaching something that felt like burnout. Given that I’m typically primed for this as year’s end approaches, I took the arrival of the dreaded ‘burn’ in late April/early May as a cue to slow things down.

Of course I can’t completely shut down. That’s not much in my nature at all.

Rather, I tend to flick a couple of creative switches that I toggle between when things get a bit heavy. However, it would also be fair to say that the change of season in recent years (typically around April/May) already activates a toggle which steers me towards an acoustic guitar.

Yes, it’s folk season for sure. I’ve been playing open mic gigs and I’ve started refining old and new original songs I’m working on, whilst revisiting some covers that I can lend an interpretation to. For a while now, I’ve been chipping away at a new album of songs and I think that this could be the year when it might finally come to fruition. Folk season isn’t always about producing something concrete and the last thing I need to do is put more pressure on myself at the moment, but in this domain it seems like the conditions are pretty favourable.

Given that last month’s blog update was solely updated to the emerging stygofauna project, I wanted to feature, well…more than one thing this month.

Stygofauna explorations stalled

Following on from last month’s update, plans for further stygofauna work with Remko had to be put on hold, but we’re hoping to back on track in April with the planned trip to the Langhorne Creek.

Noisebox featured in upcoming documentary trailer

Back in August 2024, my friend, De La Catessen label boss and composer, Luke Altmann asked me if I could build him a noisebox for an upcoming film score he was working on. I hadn’t built one of these before, but I took on the challenge and really enjoyed the process of building an instrument over a couple of weekends.

This month Luke shared a trailer for the film he worked on towards the end of 2024. Iron Winter is a documentary from Journeyman Pictures about the the herders of the Tsakhir Valley in Mongolia and their fight to preserve their traditions. The documentary looks beautiful and the score sounds amazing. It’s very cool to have an instrument that I built featured in this project.

If you’re keen to see how the noisebox was developed, I made this video last year.

Sonic Recall animation

Whilst I’ve been working away at a new Sonic Recall instalment, I started thinking about the possibilities for animating these comics. I went back to the Procreate session file for the first issue from late 2023 (“Soundcloud, c.1985”) I thought about what was possible.

Typically when I’m drawing up one of these, I’ll use multiple layers for inking, backgrounds and textural elements. It’s been my approach with these to collapse lots of the layers as I’m finishing the comic so that I can easily add some finishing touches here and these. I suppose it’s a bit like doing an audio mix and then bouncing everything down into a track for mastering. However, when I opened the file for “Soundcloud, c.1985” there were still a few extra layers for background textures and the written text.

But how to animate largely static images like this? I decided I would take a simple approach, omitting the written text layer and then editing the individual panels in a few different ways. Since a couple of the panels – like 1, 2 and 6 – represent fairly static scenes, I would create a base layer from the panel and then overlay the animated elements.

In the case of panel 1, the additional layers are the discrete lines representing the incoming tide, whilst for 2 and 6, these involved some more layers for cutting out the cloud and animating the sound text, eyes and thought bubble. You can see the collective effect here.

The other panels (3, 4 and 5) required a bit more work in terms of moving the cloud around, and in the case of 3, a complete overhaul of the original panel since I couldn’t see a way of achieving an animated effect with what was already there. In this case, I preserved some aspects of the original panel and then overlaid with some new sound text.

I’m pretty pleased with how this sound text turned out. It makes a fun gif.

The export settings for Procreate are absolutely brilliant and the features to export active frames in sequence as movie-format files saved me a mountain of time. This is how I created the two previous gifs as well!

But in order to pull everything together, this is where the excellent video editor, DaVinci Resolve came into play. Within a Resolve session, I could structure the video exports from Procreate and sequence them accordingly. In the case of panel 3, there were a couple of individual video exports (waves and text) which I overlaid and repositioned. Then I brought in some field recordings, recorded a voice over (in place of the comic’s original text) and automated some panning, transitions, etc.

The final video is below. As I’m working away on the next Sonic Recall, I’m creating both the static comic and animated version concurrently, so it’s all a little more time consuming, but hopefully the comic and animation for this instalment will arrive at roughly the same time!

Rather than a round-up of activities for February, this month will be a bit different. I’ll be providing an overview of an interesting (and somewhat unlikely) collaboration which came about towards the end of January.

Teaming up with an evolutionary biologist to go in search of stygofauna

During an afternoon in my home studio I brought up the spectrogram of a recent recording. With all acoustic energy visibly confined to the lowest end of the frequency spectrum, I strained to listen for any faint stirrings of life. As if I were mirroring the heavy lifting of my ears, I’d find myself squinting my eyes intently at the track marker on the screen horizontally scrolling in time across the spectral representation of the audio. From about 200Hz upwards there was an an acoustic void – total darkness. Bereft of energy. It was as dark as I imagined the water column that I’d plunged a hydrophone into earlier that day.

Towards the end of 2024, a childhood friend messaged me about some research activity being conducted on the Fleurieu Peninsula which he thought would pique my curiosity. He mentioned that a researcher had been recently conducting field work on ‘ancient shrimp’ at natural springs and aquifers in the region. They wondered if the researcher might be interested in collaborating with me to acoustically survey these springs and aquifer ecosystems. Whilst I’d previously submerged microphones off jetties, pontoons, wetlands and tidal substrates, plunging into the mysterious realm of springs and aquifers was new territory. I was officially piqued!

After a bit of liaising with the local council, my friend managed to get hold of researcher’s contact details and in early January I’d made contact and introduced myself. The researcher (Remko Leijs) is an evolutionary biologist based at the South Australian Museum and Flinders University, specialising in groundwater fauna and native bee populations. During our e-mail exchanges I learned that the groundwater fauna wasn’t confined to shrimp alone, but consisted of a vast array of microorganisms: blind prawns, crustaceans, beetles, mites, snails and worms. These species are commonly identified as ‘stygofauna’, often only a couple of millimetres in length and whose evolutionary lineage can be traced back about 7 million years! [1]

[1] Remko would later explain to me that this 7 million year lineage for stygofauna populations was consistent with the geology of the regions containing the subterranean ecosystems suited to these lifeforms.

The uncovering of stygofauna

Research of stygofauna is relatively recent. Although some research dates back to the mid-1980s, early insights would take time to coalesce into peer-reviewed and grounded evidence over the next couple of decades; with discoveries of mysterious fish species, crayfish, snails and worms found in subterranean environments across the globe. Recent research in the 21st Century has further established the genetic lineage of these species, as well as the unique environmental niches that they occupy.

It was these unique niches of freshwater springs and aquifers that brought Remko’s field research to the Fleurieu Peninsula. Remko would later explain to me that although these water systems consist of vast interconnected networks, they are often separated by natural boundaries of porous gravel substrates. This allows water to propagate slowly through a vast network, but because of these boundaries, the lifeforms which occupy a given area are often isolated from adjacent zones. This limits genetic diversity and means that a given population occupying a spring or aquifer is entirely unique to it. Because of these ecological niches, this means is that new species of stygofauna are routinely being discovered.

To give an indication of this scale of discovery, at the beginning of the 21st Century, a team of ‘stygobiologists’ dropped a series of sampling nets into bore holes across the Kimberly and Pilbara regions of north-western West Australia, the West Australian Yilgarn, and the Nullabor Plain of South Australia. What emerged across 15 years of field work was the discovery of 750 entirely new species. That alone would have been impressive, but these discoveries also debunked a contemporaneous view that Australia had only a small amount of subterranean fauna, and in turn resulted in Australia becoming a focal point for subterranean biodiversity, with an estimated 4000 different species.

Learning of this was fascinating and since Remko expressed an interest in my acoustic ecology work, I was excited to join him in the field. There was a catch though: his work on the Fleurieu at the end of 2024 had stalled due to a lack of continued funding. Whilst he generously shared the GPS location for one of the Fleurieu springs he surveyed (on the outskirts of Second Valley), he noted that this spring had gone dry due to below-average rainfall across 2024. So whilst I’d already gained an insight in his work, it didn’t seem very likely we’d be able to collaborate in the field any time soon. However, Remko proposed an alternative endeavour: we’d visit a suburban park instead.

Taking the suburban plunge

A week later, I drove to the outer Adelaide suburb of Mitchell Park and arrived at an unassuming public reserve. Unloading a couple of bags of gear, I kept a watch for someone with a wild shock of white hair (which I’d noted from a previous Google search) and saw a figure give a distant wave from the other side of the park. Having now met in person for the first time, he gestured in the direction of a bore hole a short distance away.

I’d brought my portable Sound Devices recorder and a single hydrophone with additional microphone cables on hand. As I unspooled the cables and fired up the recorder, Remko methodically tapped the PVC borehole cover off with a hammer, revealing the ominously dark aperture of bore hole itself. In his previous e-mails, Remko had explained that this bore was approximately 20 metres deep, so this was why I’d brought the additional mic cables to extend out the 9-metre length of the hydrophone’s cable.

Boring

This was one of the only bore holes of its type in metropolitan Adelaide and was maintained by the government water authority, SA Water. Remko had brought along a narrow plastic net to collect stygofauna samples and we tethered part of the hydrophone’s cable to the net’s rope to keep both the mic and net at a fixed distance from each other.

Remko proposed that it would be best to record and listen in two positions: at an approximate mid-point in the water column and then lowering the mic to rest at the gravel substrate. At the time, I was struggling to visualise this, so I jotted down a sketch later in the day and expanded this scribble into a diagram which I’ve included below.

This is strictly an abstraction of the borehole in question, but it might give you a better impression of the role of the bore in relation to the subterranean environment, especially the water-bearing strata some 15 to 20 metres below ground level. This part of the bore pipe is surrounded by a mesh which allows water and microorganisms (such as stygofauna) to pass through. So what you have is a narrow column of water with a gravel substrate at its base, where the bore pipe ends.

Listening in

With the hydrophone in its first position at a mid-point of the water column, we clamped headphones on and listened in closely.

Hrrrrummmmmmmmmm…

This the vibrational summation of thousands of vehicles within a radius of kilometres. Cars, trucks and motorbikes circulating along unseen roads and streets, idling at intersections, occasionally hooning at excessive speeds. Could we hear anything else aside from this? Much like my opening studio anecdote – but without the aid of a spectral visualisation – we listened as hard as possible for something other than low, murky thrumming of vehicular agents.

In this scenario, it could be easy to fool ourselves, like tricking the brain into perceiving the semblance of an object in the dark when your eyes are unable to adjust. But occasionally, and very discretely there would be a stirring in the gravel or something making contact with the highly-sensitive hydrophone. Was this the stygofauna? A tiny shrimp or maybe a worm? There was no way to tell. It was pure speculation.

Based on my previous recordings in freshwater ecosystems, I had wondered if stygofauna communicated through something akin to stridulation, which is the rubbing to two body parts together to produce sound. Terrestrial insects such as crickets do this, but so do freshwater organisms like ‘boatmen’, producing a distinctive trilling like sound. Additionally, certain shrimp species such as the common pistol-shrimp produce their characteristic ‘snap’ by releasing bubbles of compressed air from their claws.

When I asked Remko about these aspects of communication, he said that there were no indications of this based on the research literature produced to date. Whilst not entirely ruling out the possibility, he said that the minuscule size of stygofauna (commonly ranging in single or micro millimetres) might be part of the reason we can’t pick up an acoustic signal, if one exists at all. He also suggested that these species may rely on chemical communication instead, but stressed that this was entirely speculative.

Stirring in the substrate

When we lowered the hydrophone to the base of the gravel, the low thrumming continued and any incidental stirrings diminished further. Perhaps we had disrupted the environment too much and in turn driven away any stygofauna present in the water column. It was hard to tell. Nevertheless, this whole endeavour had intrigued us enormously and we were keen to continue exploring the possibility of listening into the world of stygofauna.

I told Remko that I would take these recordings home, produce some spectrograms and interrogate the audio further. This is where we go full circle and return to this post’s opening scene. Having listened back through the recordings in the quietude of my home studio, I carefully annotated the spectrograms, noting anything that presented itself as an acoustic outlier amidst the continuous low thrum of the traffic.

Eventually, I resorted to filtering out the low thrum all together, thinning the audible spectrum to nothing more than discrete wisps of acoustic artefacts. Whereas parsing acoustic outliers amidst the low traffic sounds were like attempting to see the semblance of things in the dark, now with the audio signal stripped back to scarcely anything, it was now akin to trying to see motes of dust in the dark. Still there was something there. That stirring of activity in the gravel was something to go on.

Planning ahead

Remko and I have been in contact since this initial endeavour and we’re planning to visit a site on the Fleurieu in March. Unlike the bore hole in Mitchell Park, this site would be much further removed from the influence of traffic, so we might have a better chance of hearing what the stygofauna are up to. In addition to this, Remko is keen to retrieve some samples from this site and seeing if we can record them in the isolation of his laboratory. Which reminds me: I’ve got to get around building a soundproof box.

The following article was highly informative to the writing of the section ‘The uncovering of Stygofauna’ – “The Creatures That Time Forgot”, June 18th 2012 – https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/the-creatures-that-time-forgot-20120616-20g5n.html

Although I shared this in January’s newsletter, I thought I would post it separately here and include some of the early drafts which detail the comic’s development over a couple of months.

Notebook drafts (November/December 2024)

Procreate draft (January 2025)