Let's Go for a Walk :-‪)‬ Rob Marvin

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

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


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


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

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

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

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

I'm breathing pretty heavy in this one.


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

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

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


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

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

Surprise! I couldn't. 

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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