old artist diptych

I have a new piece on Studio 360 this weekend. I interviewed two artists (Betty Woodman and Taylor Mead) who have little in common except their age. In the piece, they give their individual reflections on spending a lifetime as an artist.

fuzzy & blue

My pop music project has a new home. 

Check it out and tell your friends...

www.fuzzyblue.net

eat cake

I produced and directed this radio fiction piece, which features performances by Eliza Skinner, Birch Harms, and Curtis Gwinn. We developed the story by recording and editing improvisations over the course of several weeks. It aired this weekend on Weekend America's final broadcast. Enjoy!

washing lint

My cat is famous.
Courtesy of my friend Sally.

wordless music

The four-hour radio series I made about the Wordless Music concerts in New York is airing this month on WNYC. You can listen to it here.

Jad Abumrad hosts the programs, I wrote & produced. They are based around live recordings that WNYC made of several concerts from the Wordless Music series that took place last fall.

The Wordless Music Series pairs rock and electronic musicians with more traditional chamber and new music performers, to create an entirely new concert experience. As Wordless Music opens on a new season, WNYC presents four one-hour specials that highlight and underscore the ground-breaking '07-'08 season, hosted by Radio Lab's Jad Abumrad.

The shows are music/documentary hybrids, with pieces that support the live performances and explore some of the issues that the concert series raises, particularly the relationship between classical music and pop. Guests on the shows include Meredith Monk and David Lang, with music from Beruit, Do Make Say Think, Electrik Company, Nico Muhly, Sandro Perri, Hauschka, Torngat, John Adams & Gavin Bryars.

Enjoy!

free agent

As of now, I am officially no longer an employee of Fair Game.

I left my job there so that I could get back to doing more documentary and music work. There are lots of new and exciting things on the horizon, I'll post more here as they happen along...

In the meantime, I'll be working on a limited series (4 episodes) for WNYC based on the Wordless Music concert series in New York. They'll be music show/documentary hybrids, with full musical selections accompanied by short documentary-type pieces that support the music.

walter ruttman's weekend

I just found this blog post from my friend Jesse Shapins, who is at Harvard working on a doctorate in urban documentation (that's not the exact name of the degree, it's just my understanding of what it is). Last semester, he wrote a paper on Walter Ruttmann, whose work I spoke about at my Union Docs talk last August. Click on the links below for a pdf of his paper. Here's a copy of his blog post:

The subject of the first paper was inspired directly by the presentation of Jonathan Mitchell in The Documentary Bodega Audio Series (thanks UD & Jonathan!). This essay explores Walter Ruttmann’s 1930 experimental radio documetnary Weekend. In particular, as I write, my aim here is to develop an analysis of Weekend in the context of the discourse of documentary arts, sensorial experience, and urban representation. While groundbreaking on many fronts, I am most interested in Ruttmann’s attempt to represent the urban experience in a purely sonic form through documentary recordings. For as Fran Tonkiss writes, “The modern city, for all that there is to see, is not only spectacular: it is sonic.” It is precisely this interplay between the visual and the aural in the context of urban space and its representation through montage that makes Ruttmann’s work so compelling. While my analysis focuses on Ruttmann’s Weekend, I also travel through the work and theory of other avant-garde critics and artists of the time, especially Rudolf Arnheim, Dziga Vertov, Alfred Döblin, and Walter Benjamin. Recent research into the role of the senses in experiencing place conducted in geography and neuroscience helps further develop the framework for my theoretical arguments. Cultural geographer Gerald Pocock writes, “[Sound] is dynamic: something is happening for sound to exist. It is therefore temporal, continually and perhaps unpredictably coming and going, but it is also powerful, for it signifies existence, generates a sense of life, and is a special sensory key to interiority.” It is the auditory faculty’s unique “key to interiority” that can be developed through temporary blindness that grounds my final argument about the new subjectivity suggested by Ruttmann’s Weekend.

You can read listen to the piece and read the whole paper online or download a PDF.

no comment

I finally break my blogging silence to bring you this...

new toy

I've been working on this score for a television documentary, and I decided that I'm going to need a broader palate of sounds. So last week I bought a set of fairly realistic orchestra samples. I have it all set up so I can record the instruments directly into Pro Tools. I played with it all weekend, just to get to know the software and see what it's capable of doing. This is what I ended up with:


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new news

There are a few things that have been going on lately that I'd like to share with you all...

Item #1 - Union Docs
I'm going to be giving a talk at Union Docs next Sunday, August 26th at 7pm, part of their Documentary Bodega series. I'll be discussing the idea of documentary as a musical artform, and my talk will include work by Walter Ruttmann, Glenn Gould, and Steve Reich. The address is 322 Union Avenue, in Brooklyn. Click here for directions. Admission is $8. Come check it out if you can!

Item #2 - PRX's mp3 downloads
Ear Crack the downloadable mp3 collection is here! PRX has started an mp3 label, and one of their offerings is a collection of my work. You can check it out here or here. They also offer collections of other producers' work, including Jake Warga, Benjamin Walker, Dmae Roberts, Long Haul Productions, and Love & Radio, to name a few. Check out their whole catalogue here.

Item #3 - Half-time
Starting Sept 1st, I'll be half-time at Fair Game. I was really missing doing documentaries (and other non-comedy related stuff), so I decided to start using half of my week to produce work for other shows again. My first project will be the sound design and musical score for a television documentary that will air as an episode of Nova on PBS in January 2008. I'll post more details when I can.

That's it for now. Hopefully I'll be posting more often when I'm back to freelancing again, so keep checking in!

my brilliant niece