I met Ernie Lyons during the making of The Creation Cycle, since at that time he owned the only cassette duplicating facility in town. He really went the distance for us on that project, working till about three in the morning (with us helping to do the shrink-wrap) the night before we were due to drive up to Sault Ste Marie for the Creation Cycle opening. It turned out that Ernie lived only a few blocks from me, and we became friends. A couple of years later Ernie merged his operation with Holborne Distributing, a music publishing house in Newmarket, Ontario, and began producing some of those "new-age music with natural sounds" releases. He landed a contract to produce a cassette for the Grandview Inn in Muskoka, and called me up to ask if I would do the music. "The Spirit of Muskoka" is the end result. To be honest, it's not my favourite work; I felt like I was under some pressure to make the music rather more bland than I would have liked. Whether or not that pressure was really there I don't know, but the resulting music is certainly among the most "tame" I've ever done. Still, the Grandview Inn seemed to like it, and it actually sold fairly well. Ernie recorded the natural sounds on location. A couple of sample tracks from Spirit of Muskoka are available on the Music page.

The Spirit of Muskoka was originally recorded using analog equipment and released on cassette (CDs weren't all that affordable back then). It has since been digitally remastered and is available as a limited-edition CD. Contact Northwind Sound (click the "Contact" button below) for more information.