The Third Coast Festival (the South By Southwest of public radio) interviewed Nick van der Kolk, Nick Williams, and I about how we developed and produced our radio story The Wisdom of Jay Thunderbolt for Nick vd K’s show, Love and Radio.
I know, I know. I promised I’d write more about how we put the piece together back in April, and then quickly got swamped with other work. BUT Thanks to Third Coast, you can read everything I would have written here on their site.
Follow the link and click “extra.”
Eh. What the hell. Or you can read the mirrored interview, below.
Hey lookee here at this thing I produced/scored/remixed in collaboration with Nick van der Kolk for his intrepid radio show/podcast, Love and Radio. Heads up: this episode is intended for mature audiences listening with headphones.
I’d like to tell you more about how we put it together sometime soon, but for now I’ve got to focus on finishing those durn taxes.
I’m at the Third Coast International Audio Festival in Chicago.
Come track me down and say “hi!”
Also, please take a listen to my experimental submission to the Book Odds ShortDocs challenge and tell me what you think.
El Pajaro Volador (The Flying Bird)
I composed all the music in this piece using samples provided by the band, The Books, manipulated in various ways along with other sounds from my interview tape. My goal was to try to help augment the excitement and enthusiasm that Rosalia Roio, my interviewee, expresses as she plays her instrument. I also wanted the music to creep into the interview bit by bit, eventually overtaking the dialogue. (I’m not sure how well this worked, in retrospect.)
I added a lot of textural layers and sonic gestures that are difficult to hear in my final “radio” mix. So for anyone who’s interested, here’s a special “music only” version:
A client needed to send me some production materials–a script and some audio recordings–in order for me to begin work on a short project tomorrow. Normally they’d just upload the files to my FTP sever, but in this case everything was a hard-copy: the script printed on paper (with hand-written notes) and the audio burned to CD-R. These hard copies were also in midtown Manhattan and I’m in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Someone had to go pick them up.
Just to be clear (least my colleague read this and get the wrong idea) this wasn’t a big deal and I’m not really complaining. I only mention it as another one of ways I see my digital and analog lives blurring. I’ve grown so used to making these kinds of exchanges online that taking a few extra minutes to make a physical hand-off somehow seemed…maybe not antiquated so much as unnecessarily inefficient given the tools at our disposal.
Again: NOT a big deal. The subway makes New York City a reasonably good sneakernet. Besides, I enjoy reading on the subway. I had just finished a book, so I grabbed one of my roommate’s magazines on the way out the door. (I tend to read magazines online these days.)
Settling into my Q train seat a few minutes later, I opened to the first page and caught myself thinking, who turned off Adblock?
One memory in particular I have about Rev 105 is being in 6th or 7th grade and listening to special feature about Soul Coughing. They devoted a whole hour of air-time to the group, featuring live and unreleased tracks interspersed with interviews and pre-produced segments about the band’s history and development (narrated, I think, by Mary Lucia). It was cassette-tape “gold,” and tape it I did. (Where is that tape today? Did I record over it?)
Remember how we used to collect our music?
You’d hear a catchy song on the radio but miss the ID, so you’d call the station. “That song. What was that song?” and you’d hum a few bars for the DJ, approximate a few misheard lyrics. “I think there was a trumpet?” And then she’d tell you what it was.
The next day you’d call the station to make a request, and they’d promise play it sometime within the hour. You’d wait at your parent’s stereo, your finger hovering in anticipation over the red circle on the tape deck. 90 minutes passed, and then:
“By request, here’s…,” the first few bars already creeping up beneath her voice. You’d fumble for the “rec” button.
And so you collected whole shoe-boxes of mixtapes with no particular unifying theme, each song missing the first few seconds because, of course, you needed to hit “rec” and “play” at the same time.
