During the early stages of the pandemic, I took to going on long walks with much greater frequency and the neighbourhood where I live in Toronto is super conducive to that. It's not far from High Park, and directly beside the Humber River, where there's a whole system of trails—even the streets themselves have little passageways and staircases that connect them.

These walks also coincided with my interest in humbucker pickups—the ones you stick in the soundholes of acoustic guitars. It turns out they're a very interesting way to amplify (ferromagnetic) metal objects. Stick them directly to the object, it's like a bit like a contact mic; hover a half inch away from the vibrating item, and you get a different tone altogether—often one with a rich low end.

My explorations started in my home studio with everything from barbecue skewers to a Slinky, streetsweeper bristles to steelwool, but soon I graduated to various larger metal structures I'd encounter on walks—signs, fences, sculptures, railings. Armed with my Zoom recorder, percussion mallets, bows, and guitar picks, I'd wander around scavenging for sounds.

Not long after I started making these performance-field recordings, they installed a pedestrian bridge in some woods (the ones in the title of this piece) just northwest of me. The first time I crossed that bridge, I instantly knew it would make a fruitful sound source. Even before I started playing on it, part of me had decided that I would make some sort of long-ish piece using it as the only “instrument.”

I worked sporadically from 2021 to 2023 on “Sleepwalking Through Lambton Woods,” and discovered various different techniques to play and record the bridge along the way. I started out in the same way that I had been making outdoor recordings before: with only my pair of Dean Markley humbuckers and a bunch of percussion implements. Eventually, when I bought a recorder with more inputs, my input arsenal grew to include a LOM Geofón, which captured the bridge's low frequencies impeccably, and a pair of contact condenser mics, that preseneted additional perspectives in vivid detail. Typically, I would distribute the various pickups to different locations on the bridge to get a full-sounding composite image, while also ensuring that each individual input was engaging on its own.

The performance side of things grew in parallel, the humbuckers themselves became a wonderful tool for striking or rubbing the bridge and provided grittier textures that would often defy their acoustic origins. I also started incorporating chains, brushes, bows and even e-bowed streetsweeper bristles, that would rapidly slap agains the bridge's surfaces, generating sustained tones of various kinds.

This work ended up being quite a challenge for me and yielded one of the oddest pieces I've made. I named it the way I did because of its peculiar form—I felt as though a good part of its creation was almost sub- or semi-conscious in some strange way. The fact that recording the material opened me up to so much scrutiny only amplified the piece's weirdness to me. I had everything from quizzical looks to fascinated conversations. Once, someone even accused me of recording her children!

As much as my compositions usually employ a wide variety of different instruments, I am also fascinated by limitation. That being said, I had never before made a piece of such a large scope that relied so little on pitch, and only used sounds from a single source (with next to no processing).


Nick Storring — bridge.
Composed, performed, recorded, mixed and mastered by Nick Storring, 2021-2023