This CD was commissioned by Gary and Joanie McGuffin to accompany their book of the same name. See the Projects and Links pages for more information. Just a quick caveat: these tracks begin and end rather abruptly, since I lifted them directly from the CD, which is actually one continuous piece of music. The track positions are thus rather arbitrary, and typically occur right in the middle of something.

When Blain and I first sat down to figure out how we were going to do a recording of Arthurian legends, we really had no idea what form it would take. We started by recording about five hours of Blain telling stories and playing guitar, with Clare doing the female dialog parts. We then edited it down to about 90 minutes, added some more music, sound effects and weird synth pads, and juggled various parts around to make a cohesive whole. As sometimes happens with projects, it kind of took on a life of its own, and the end result far exceeded our expectations. It's a production work I'm rather proud of.

This forty minute "concept" work was the first thing recorded and produced at Northwind Sound. It was commissioned by artist Peter Maqua to be part of his multimedia installation of "traditional and contemporary Native vision experience," entitled Creation Cycle '89. There's a lot of back-story to this project, some of which I cover in the Creation Cycle Project and Peter Maqua pages.

This music was commissioned by Ernie Lyons, a producer at Holborne Distributing in Newmarket Ontario (Holborne is now defunct, but they used to market Dan Gibson's highly successful "Solitudes" line of CDs). Ernie was putting together one of those "music with natural sounds" CDs for the wildlife organization Ducks Unlimited, and needed about an hour of music, pronto. I finally came up with about half an hour (the other half is a piece by David Phillips, of Gentle Spirit Music), and did the whole thing in about a week, although I probably only slept about six hours during the whole time. Ernie recorded the natural sounds on location.

Another Ernie Lyons "New-Age-brain-drool-music-to-eat-yogurt-by" project, this time a commissioned work for the Grandview Inn, a monstrous Muskoka hotel in the vanishing, old-world tradition of monstrous Muskoka hotels, situated on Fairy Lake, outside Bala, Ontario. It was our first collaboration, and it was actually fairly successful.

After hearing Superior: Journeys on an Inland Sea, Rod Cunningham, a commercial artist and film maker from Cambridge, Ontario tracked me down and asked me to write some music for a video he was making for the Algoma Central Corporation, Canada's largest Great Lakes shipping company. It was supposed to be a retrospective of the last 100 years or so of the corporation's history, ending with a kind of rah-rah, hooray-for-Algoma-Central look forward to an even brighter future for all the stockholders. Not exactly my thing, but I decided to tackle it anyway.

For more information on Crazy Man Michael, see the Links section. Frankly, these tunes aren't exactly our best efforts. They were recorded and mixed in a hurry in order to get something in to the Millrace Festival on time, and sadly, the quality suffered as a result. Still, they may be worth a quick listen... These songs all feature Clare McNaul on lead vocals and bodhran and Sally Ludwig singing harmony, with Chris on bass, electric guitar, harmonica and recorder, and Blain Bovee on acoustic guitar and 10-string mandola. All were recorded after Mike Kosonic left the band and before Randy Jackiw joined. The electric guitar, harmonica, mandola and recorder parts were overdubbed. Blain also sings harmony on all tunes except Henry Martin and Blackwaterside. All tracks were recorded at Stream Of Sound Studios near Fergus, Ontario, engineered by Terry Golletz, and co-produced by Chris, Blain and Terry.