tracks all mastered by Ian Hawgood
Corwin Trails is pleased to announce the release of Wolf Songs Folk Songs. Written over the course of 4 years, on three different continents, this 43-minute tapestry of sound is almost exclusively made up of acoustic instrumentation and field recordings. The field recordings came first, when in 2015 Samuel embarked on a 4-month trip throughout India and Nepal, amassing three volumes of material. But it was upon returning home to northern Michigan, reconnecting with the landscape there, that allowed the compositions to really take root.

In the dead of winter, shacked up in a small cabin, Samuel began experimenting with whatever instruments were lying around: banjo, bazouki, nepeneroyka, sarangi, auto harp, and of course guitar. But on a chance trip to the hardware store, he happened upon a box of tiny little springs and, inspired by the microtonal quality of a lot of far-eastern instruments, thought it might sound interesting to slip them onto acoustic strings. Well, sure enough, it did—enough so that Samuel spent a few days recording, processing and finally playing an 88-key custom MIDI instrument. The next project was percussion.

Almost daily, Samuel would wander into the woods and listen: the creeking trees, the woodpeckers, freezing rain on dead leaves. Then he would play: peel birch bark, hit dead wood, throw rocks on ice, tap snow. That winter was spent indulging in books by Bernie Krause and recordings by Chris Watson. The sound of the natural world was imbued with new meaning; there were new ways of engaging with it.

Lastly, it was entering a natural history museum and seeing the dioramas of the ambient Northwoods wilderness—the Kincade-esque landscape art, the dried leaves strewn about, the grotesquely taxidermied animals, the push-the-button/hear-the-animal call function to the side of the display—that evoked an uncanny mixture of that childlike wonder, where nature is magical and precious but dangerous and rightfully feared, but much more so a sense of alienation at just how desperately out of touch we’ve become. The banal aesthetic of state parks, bad maps, ranger-led walks—all these aspects of simulated nature play into this album. In this sense, Wolf Songs Folk Songs is both an homage to and a requiem for nature.

Album credits:

Composed, Arranged and Produced by Samuel Vandiver
Mastered by Ian Hawgood at Home Normal Studios
Artwork and design by Lucia Strakova
Photograph of deer taken at Call of the Wild museum in Gaylord, Michigan
3-D laser cut of photo done by Lake Art, LLC
Sample in “The absolute, irreversible emptiness of extinction” used with permission, courtesy of Natural History Magazine, taken from The language and music of the Wolves (Tonsil Records, 1971), with narration by Robert Redford
Guest Vocals on “An old oak tree” by Amie Simons
Other samples previously released by Corwin Trails as Selected Field Recordings from India/Nepal, Vols. I, II & III (Green Field Recordings, 2016)