Camp of Wolves

David Salisbury is a Fort Langley-based sound artist that primarily uses his Camp Of Wolves project to explore stories within the psychogeography of untamed wilderness, towns and remote outposts.

Bear Creek wasn’t on any tourist map, but it knew how to whisper to you, low and steady. A tangle of humanity grown over the bones of a mostly forgotten wild.

I swore I’d never come back. Yet here I am, driving slow past the gas station that still sells firewood, past the elementary school with its peeling paint, past the woods that haven’t moved an inch even though everything else feels shifted, almost as though it’s been holding its breath since I left. The street I grew up on feels narrower, the trees smaller and the air heavier, like the town’s been rebuilt to look almost like I remember, just enough to make me question if I ever really left at all. The storm drains still snake through the neighborhood like veins. Funny how the things you buried don’t stay dead. Not here.

There was a fire pit in the clearing at the bottom of the hill. It's paved over now, but I can still smell the smoke. I can still hear the pop of pine and voices, not the words, just the shape of them, laughter with too much edge, stories we only told in the dark. Ghosts of long-lost friends. We treated it like a game, like a warning, like a dare. The truth is I started dreaming again about the woods, about the path behind the pond that leads nowhere but still feels deeper and longer than it should. About a voice, not quite mine, whispering things I forgot I knew. When I walk at night, even now, the streetlights flicker as I pass, just like they used to. I think the creek remembers me. I think it never stopped watching.

Says David: "With Bear Creek I wanted to give the album a warm, handmade feel as though it were cut from construction paper, coloured with crayons and held together with paste like some sort of weird childhood diorama imbued with a lingering sense of the "other". I tried to walk a fine line between complex, often conflicting emotions while exploring this theme, drawing from an organic, woodsy-summer-camp-inspired sound palette that still remained, at its core, electronic music. At it's essence it is really a sort of Lynchian love letter to my childhood home and that is what I hope to convey

The songs were written from 2022 to 2024 in Greater Vancouver, the Cariboo, and along the southwest coast of Vancouver Island, environments which all had a large impact on the sound design and composition of these tracks."