In the late spring of 2025, a friend of mine and I took a trip up Mount Rainier to 1) detox from our work lives, 2) try out each other’s array of camera lenses and 3) visit the famous mineral springs on the mountain. I hadn’t visited a spring before, so I had no real idea of what to expect- but I had enough forethought to bring some form of audio recording equipment. Along with my Canon Rebel T7 armed with various adapters to use my vintage lenses (namely the infamous radioactive Super-Takumar 1:1.8/55), I strapped my Zoom F3 to my belt and bagged a Shure SM57 and XLR cable to use if I came across some audio worth pointing a mic at.

After a few hours of driving and talking about brutalism, film versus digital photography, and the history of these imminent mineral springs, we reached the parking site and set out for a small hike. Early on into the walk, I stopped to enjoy the view of a discolored field, completely oblivious to what was nearby. Once a few noisier hikers had disappeared around a bend, a sound tickled my ear. Somewhere in a brush beyond my reach, was something bubbling away. Thankfully, my companion on this expedition values the joys of letting people discover things naturally before he begins inundating them with details, so my curiosity was piqued to full wonderment. The next hour was recording several different springs both at a distance and up close. I am of the opinion that water sounds are woefully cliché in ambient music, so I wasn’t sure at the time what I would use the recordings for.

At the beginning of December 2025, work began the heaviest time of the year; and I was going into it with a new position in that job that entailed more responsibility and stress. After a particularly tense meeting, I headed home taking the same thirty minute commute I had for the last five years. Upon pulling into my driveway, I happened to look eastward and saw a cloud oddly shaped like a square. Instead of questioning how that was possible, I instead thought of square waves in ambient music. I had recently discovered a YouTube channel called logan daniel mcdonald, in which a fellow ambient enthusiast post live takes on his synths. Several of them had tones that resembled low-passed square waves, something I found in my favorite works by Brian Eno. The recent appreciation of these sonic palettes, seeing a cloud shaped in the same shape, and needing to relieve myself of work stress resonated with me, and I had to do something about it.

I went into my music studio, hooked up my beloved Roland Alpha Juno to my modular case, made a patch that would lightly swell a low-passed square wave, sustained what I played with long delays from the Instruō Lúbadh and plate washes on the Folktek Alter, and began a journey into pouring meditative Juno compositions out with mineral spring backgrounds throughout.

That first improvisational burst that gave way to the overall project became the opening track Square Clouds, which also acted as a subtle nod to the use of Mutable Instruments’ Clouds for some octave shimmers. The initial was the droning tones overlapping each other and drifting their panned delays the longer it decayed. I wanted something very pure and lush, so I kept myself from adding anything to the delay chain that would degrade quality overtime. Instead, I added animation with some resonant low-pass swells on the Alpha Juno, washed it with that lovely Folktek Alter plate reverb, and then rerecorded each stereo channel playing through the dry signal of a vintage Pioneer SR-101 for some dusty vacuum tube saturation. To add foundation to the piece, I used my faithful Moog Minitaur, manually sweeping the filter to act as a rippling response to the Alpha Juno swells.

The second track In The Essence was originally a conclusion movement to Square Clouds, but I felt it served best as its own moment of the whole project- kind of acting as a intermission that works in tandem with the bare, toneless third track. This track gives way to simpler tones from ebowed guitar and melodic flares from the Moog Minitaur. The technique used was a nod to the composition The Hills Will Be Our Witness from The Monochrome Collection. This time, however, I made an elaborate logic tree using Ableton’s “follow action” tool for MIDI clips, recorded five takes total with the Minitaur playing through a spring reverb, and changed the speed on four of those takes. Two we’re slowed down a fourth and panned slightly to the left and right each, and the other two were slowed an octave down and panned hard left and right. This processed allowed the spring reverb to also lengthen its tail with the Minitaur and maintain it’s strong response to that frequency range, whereas it would have become more drippy and less tonal with the lower frequencies.

A Fragile Moment is a continuation of some of the techniques practiced in the collaborative project Three Pools using loops and heavily slowed samples. The primary loop features myself saying, “…but even then, the distance here…” before my voice trails off and all that is heard is the bubbling of that first mineral spring I discovered on the hike. You can also hear a handful of birds throughout the loop as well, helping to create a pattern. While there are several other manipulated sounds occurring around it, this primary loop still took center stage in its production. While I let my eurorack case do the generative work of heavily feedback-modulated LFO’s opening and closing rusty filters and increasing feedback on delays, I created a feedback path of my own between the mixer the loop played into and my BBE 462 Sonic Maximizer. By twiddling the EQ on the mixer as the audio chain flowed right back into the 462 eternally, the loop was always on the edge of breaking into self-oscillating screams- but, by keeping it harnessed, the loop instead growls, glistens, and crunches under the onset of harmonic flavor. This same technique was used for a similar loop in the second half of the track The TV Greenshift from Three Pools.

Being ushered in by birdsong never heard to mankind before (eurorack biomimicry is a new obsession), the Alpha Juno resumes its role accompanied by ebowed guitar in the final track Decoy Song. The patch is absolutely dense and percussive, making mixing it in with the rest of the composition quite a task; but it is without question one of my favorite patches I’ve made on the Alpha Juno. The composition was originally written for a previous project that was going to use the mineral springs as exciters for filterbanks, but it ultimately found a home as the concluding piece to this project in a more polished and transposed form. The shimmer pad that explodes behind each note is the same patch with a lot of the Folktek Alter plate reverb, Mutable Instruments Clouds for the additional octave and space, and the same vacuum tube treatment from the Pioneer SR-101 used in Square Clouds.

While I wouldn’t say this is the most lethargic ambient project I’ve done compared to the likes of The Dichotomist, The River Doesn’t Stop fits in well the same explorational lineup made by projects like Fictional Color or The Sea Freeze. It certainly, however, continues the same noise-focused theme seen practiced in the aforementioned Three Pools and Out From The Fog.

The overall soundscape palette was taken dominantly from the Mt. Rainier trip; but while the mineral springs played a critical role in the overall characteristic of all four compositions, several other sources played as actors on the same stage bringing both new and old techniques for display. All audio manipulation occurred in my eurorack case for looping, splicing, filtering, saturating, etc.

In the opening track The Mountain Springs, I focused on sweeps and swells that would feel like wind rolling between hills and rippling through trees. I used the Vostok Atlas as a fairly resonant band-pass filter to sweep high to low over a transient-rich loop of spring water that was significantly slowed down. Behind it is the same filter chain making swells with some radio noise from my Hallicrafters Model S-40B ham radio receiver. The vacuum tubes in this radio are very old and sporadic that there are several moments where the noise jumps in gain. To lean into these surprises, the swells are provided heavy delays to continue the peaks like rhythmic ripples through the air. To a vintage FM radio, I transferred some rhythmic clicking that brought nice clock-like textures similar to the very inconspicuous clicking throughout Nature Would Ventilate. These were recorded in the room to let the space itself act as the body of the click. Bringing finale to the end of the track is a more bubbly spring sample being sustained by a spring reverb that opens up before it fades away.

Holding, Holding continues the same mineral spring themes while slowly fading in the primary loop for A Fragile Moment. Underneath it all is a tunnel-like rumble sourced from an unused recording of mine during the soundscaping process for Three Pools. The recording is taken under a major bridge in Tacoma, WA where the constant traffic would resonate all along the length of the bridge. As it was recorded in mono, I applied some plate reverb from the Folktek Alter and saturated it with the Mimosa vacuum tube module from Bizarre Jezebel. There’s also a peculiar murmuring throughout that is essentially an excessively granularized recording of some political radio station.

For details on A Fragile Moment (The Distance) refer to the same track above called A Fragile Moment from The River Doesn’t Stop.

The title New Birdsong is in reference to the birds found in this composition. Every chirp heard is completely synthesized with self-oscillating filters in my eurorack case. I used the Make Noise 0-CTRL to sequence “events” and triggers that operate various envelopes and CV levels made by my three Mutable Instruments Tides, and utilized a dual S&H module for ample organic inconsistency. All of them use a strongly dampened spring reverb that would feed back into the modulation chain for additional overtones that felt natural. The patches were quite messy, and I doubt I could ever recreate them correctly to the recorded results. Underneath the alien birdsong is the most tonal spring bubbles slowed down and delayed in reverse to make a nice texture throughout.

To complete the project with a signature technique of mine, I recorded left and right panned noise floors to sustain over the whole runtime using the same Hallicrafters Model S-40B filtered through a Krohn-Hite Model 3550.