In honor of Record Store Day (4/21!!!!) our latest podcast investigates what it means to inhabit the most profound of listening spaces, the record store. While we have done some written investigation of this space–see Jacqueline Dowdell’s January post “The Specialty Record Shop”–this podcast is an aural collage/conversation between music lovers of many stripes: academics, record store owners and employees, and artists.  This is a discussion about analog space in a digital age, and all the broken jewel cases in-between. Themes of desire, consumption, community, and aesthetics drift amidst the respondents as they address the magical space of the record shop through their lived experience.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD: Spaces of Listening / The Record Shop

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Respondents (in order of appearance):

Benjamin Gold is a freelance writer from New Jersey. His thoughts on music and movies haven’t been published in that many places, but Askmen.com and PLANET° seem to like his work.

Rebecca Berkowitz is a DJ at the 90.3 The Core (WVPH Piscataway). You can tune in to her show at thecore.fm between 8PM and 10PM on Mondays.

Eric Lott teaches American Studies in the English department at The University of Virginia.

Quinn Bishop is the owner and operator of Houston’s oldest and most active independent music store, Cactus Music.

Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman is co-founder, Editor-in-Chief and Guest Posts Editor for Sounding Out! She is also Assistant Professor of English at Binghamton University and a Fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University.

Miranda Taylor plays drums in a band called Black Wine, and is also the voice (and beat) behind Sounding Out!’s podcast introduction, which she recorded with her old band Hunchback.

Damien Keane teaches at the English department at SUNY Buffallo.

Andrew Leland  is co-editor of The Believer magazine. He speaks here with Dave Truesdell, who now staffs the Recorded Sound Collection at the University of Missouri’s Ellis Library, about Truesdell’s time working at various record stores in Columbia, Missouri.

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Aaron Trammell is co-founder and multimedia editor of Sounding Out! He is also a Media Studies PhD candidate at Rutgers University.

This podcast examines the prominent role of audio in the daily spiritual practice of Christian truck drivers. Using the lived examples of these drivers as an entry point, this segment explores the ways in which listening practices help to establish community and ground spirituality for individuals who spend long hours on the road.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD: Sound and Spirit on the Highway

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DOWNLOAD A TRANSCRIPT: Sound and Spirit on the Highway Transcript

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David B. Greenberg is a graduate of Oberlin College, where he studied religion, with an emphasis on Modern American Religious History. This podcast draws from his ethnographic research study, “Highway Religion: Truckstop Chapels, Evangelism, and Lived Religion on the Road.” David also performs and records as a singer-songwriter, and currently lives in New Jersey.

Borrowed from farm5.static.flickr.com .

Today’s entry in the Sounding Out! podcast series is a collection of interviews with sound artists from around the world. Compiled by Maile Colbert, these interviews show as much as they tell, often featuring the artists speaking in tandem with a recorded soundscape. At other moments, however; the soundscapes take on a life of their own as the artist pauses and the sonic landscape breathes.  Although Maile had discussed some of these artists’ work previously in a blog post for Sounding Out! Within a Grain of Sand, this recording seeks to investigate their work in a unique and true-to-form manner. So, listen and learn – about the practice of creating sound art.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD: Within a Grain of Sand

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Here are some brief biographic notes on the contributing artists:

Jen Boyd

“Under the Golden Gate”
Jen Boyd is a sound artist living in Northern CA. She spends time recording sounds in her environment and then arranges them into layered soundscapes. In these pieces, some sounds unfold naturally while others are processed. Although her work mostly relies on ‘natural’ sounds she uses a wide variety of sound sources to paint sonic pictures for the listener. Jen hopes to spark the interest in people of all ages to listen more closely to the environment they live in everyday. If you listen, you can hear some of her recordings on touchradio.org.

Eric Leonardson

“Interview” (feat: recording artists from the World Listening Day)

Eric Leonardson is a Chicago-based composer, radio artist, sound designer, instrument inventor, improvisor, visual artist, and teacher. He has devoted a majority of his professional career to unorthodox approaches to sound and its instrumentation with a broad understanding of texture, atmosphere and microtones. If you are interested in learning more about Eric and his project, the World Listening Project, check out this site.

Rui Costa

“Sightseeing for the Blind”

Rui Costa is a sound artist from Lisbon, Portugal. He has been publicly presenting his work since 1998. He is a founding member and artistic director of Binaural. He has performed in many venues and sound art festivals in Portugal, Spain, Italy and the United States.

and the podcast producer, compiler, and contributing artist

Maile Colbert

“Debaixo da Ponte 25 de Abril”

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Maile Colbert  is an intermedia artist with a concentration on sound and video, relocated from Los Angeles and living and working between New York and Lisbon, Portugal, and teaching at Faculdade de Belas Artes da Universidade do Porto. She spent the last two years collaborating with the art organization Binaural, and is currently director of Cross the Pond, an organization based on arts and cultural exchange between the U.S. and Portugal. She holds a BFA in The Studio for Interrelated Media from Massachusetts College of Art, and MFA in Integrated Media/Film and Video from the California Institute of the Arts. She is currently in production on an interdisciplinary experimental opera based on Portuguese Maritime history, and will release two albums this year.

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We’re officially two years old, and here’s a mix to celebrate!

Awesome Sounds From A Future Boombox!

The podcast is what’s happening if you’re listening to these words. Are you? Because remember: my central claim is that a podcast is an intimate performance venue on the internet. Keep that in mind.

I am a podcaster, musician, and assistant professor of Economics. I have released six episodes of my own podcast, The Lion in Tweed.

Me. (Photo by Hadassah Head)

The Lion in Tweed. (Drawing by Winston Rowntree)

My podcast is primarily a narrative, with music and sound effects interwoven. It is about a character, The Lion in Tweed, and his experiences as a musician and professor of economics. He is also a lion. The second half of each podcast episode is a references section where I cite my sources and leave the fictional Tweedoverse canon to discuss real things.

I am not the first podcaster to remark on the ability of podcasts to traffic in intimacy. Chris Hardwick, of the Nerdist podcast, has claimed that, due to their intimacy, podcasts are the best medium going. He stressed: “you’re talking directly into the ears of your listeners.” There is no doubt that Hardwick was referring to those white iPod earbuds, which are a primary method of listening to podcasts. Part of a podcast’s intimacy comes from the closeness of the earbud to the membrane in the ear. Listening to earbuds evokes the intimate, and physical, closeness of someone whispering in your ear. Hardwick’s style of podcast is also intimate: vocal storytelling, mostly three comedians talking about the funniest things that have happened recently. The fact that it is not visual accentuates the intimacy of “whispering in your ears.” Although I would like to argue that the visual always reduces a sense of intimacy, I may simply prefer the sonic over the visual. Nevertheless, I believe that, the intimacy to which Hardwick is refers, is tied to the fact it is only sonic.

Chris Hardwick.

The Nerdist Podcast.

COMMUNITY

Podcasts as performance have a strange kind of liveness, episode-to-episode interactivity. By this I mean that they are not immediate; they lack the urgency of a theater-goer’s applause, or a heckler’s retort. Though not immediate, they are still dynamic, with their episodic pacing. And, unlike heckling, almost completely positive. This sense of long-term interactivity provides a foundation for understanding a second way that podcasts are intimate: they can cultivate intimate and interconnected communities of listeners.

They [Stop Podcasting Yourself, hosted by Graham Clark and Dave Shumka] have a really good community of people, community interaction: people send them stuff, sometimes people send them stuff unprompted. And they have a phone number [for people to call in messages that they play].

To illustrate how interconnected this community is, let me describe to you where this quote came from. It is a clip of Dan Sai, recorded by Davin Pavlas at MaxFunCon (the annual convention of the MaximumFun.org podcast label). I know Davin because of our mutual love of MaxFun podcasts. When I brought The Lion in Tweed into the world, I advertised it on podcasts in the MaxFun network. When Davin heard the description, he began to listen to my podcast. Now we are collaborating on an episode of The Lion in Tweed, which will quote these very words when it comes out two weeks from now. Similarly, UK resident Will Owens and I exchanged tweets after he started listening to my podcast and I found out he reviewed various narrative media on his website, and now he has written a review of my podcast, which we both promote. Ours is a community in which a feeling of value comes with a sense of connectedness. The podcasts give a shared culture.

SO IN PODCASTS, WE FIND A MEDIUM that is both sonic and vocal. They provide a platform for intimate and interconnected communities, which are rooted in an alternative kind of interactivity (long-term liveness), to grow. The whisper-in-the-ear quality of podcasts, as well as the feeling of community, all but completely explain why podcasts are so intimate.

AUTHENTICITY

Podcasts may be hip and modern, but they are not ironic. Podcasts represent a distillation of what the podcasters genuinely love, and in that they find their authenticity. According to Paul F. Tompkins, a comedian and podcaster:

It’s very freeing to be able to say: “Here are all the things that I like; I’m going to put them all into this [podcast].”

That was at minute 50:32 of Nerdist podcast ep 33 hosted by Chris Hardwick, with Paul F. Tompkins as a guest.

Paul F. Tompkins

The Pod F. Tompkast

Here is Jesse Thorn, mastermind behind the aforementioned MaximumFun.org, in an interview by Neiman Labs:

I can mostly just do things that I am interested in, and so I don’t have to do something that is false to me, and I can let my guiding light be, “Do I like this and think it’s worth doing?”

Jesse Thorn.

The Sound of Young America.

And we see that authenticity completes the puzzle: podcasts are intimate because they feel so real. In podcasts it feels like you are listening to a real person because you are listening to the things that a real person loves…and interacting with real people is much more intimate than feeling like you are interacting with a marketing department (as you may when listening to a CD, or radio-show).

This is how I construct intimate performance venues: Audio-only, voice/storytelling focused, in which I try to build and exploit supportive, interconnected communities of fans with a shared culture (the podcasts). And, in doing so, I try to remain true to what I truly love. This authenticity, I believe, deepens the intimacy.

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In the background of this podcast episode, Andreas plays an instrumental cover of “Bound for Hell” by Love and Rockets.

From the crackle, pop and hiss of a record to the scuffle over Arizona noise ordinances, Sounding Out! remains committed to scratching the surface of your everyday with practices, insights, and theories concerning sound and culture. For your listening pleasure, we will provide extended multimedia for our posts, cultural commentary, serendipitous soundscapes, startling sound art, and mobile mixes as we quest for listeners at all corners of the ‘tubes. These podcasts will show not tell, playing back like a new album at a midnight party. Let us celebrate the archeology of sound, as we follow an episodic guide excavating relics of the unseen. If you’ve got an idea for a future podcast or would like to submit work, please drop me a line at aht@soundstudiesblog.com.

In today’s podcast, SO! guest blogger, law professor, and co-author of Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling, Peter DiCola mashes creativity, intellectual property, race and music into a lecture you can’t afford to miss. DiCola addresses the legalities of sampling under the current expansive definitions of copyright and discusses how lawsuits brought an end to the “Golden Age of Sampling” in the early 1990s. Arguing that the current music industry practices constrain musical creativity, DiCola suggests reforms that would make clearing samples much more streamlined. With an introduction and Q and A by SO! Editor-in-Chief Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman, SO! regular contributors Andreas Pape and Osvaldo Oyola and economics professor Daniel Henderson. Listen in, and leave some feedback!

Thanks to River Read Books for hosting this event, and to William Huston for the recording.

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