Mike Weis Profiled

Source: Bandcamp Daily.

“I think of it as a symphony, and this is the last movement,” percussionist Mike Weis explains, gesturing towards the autumnal sights and sounds of the gorgeous ridges and swales of Miller Woods. A lot of stories about the decline in Rust Belt cities focus on loss and suffering, but this area, where Weis often makes field recordings and engages with wildlife, was essentially saved by the decline in his birthplace of Gary, Indiana. If you’ve seen Gary from the freeway or from the street, it probably seems strange to imagine that the backyard of the U.S. Steel Corporation Gary Works is one of the most botanically diverse units of the National Park Service; but the large natural area helped to separate the steel production from the general public, and as steelworks and the population of the city have both sharply declined, the land was never developed.