clean your ears

The Quiet American curates one-minute vacations on his amazing website.

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"Surely you can spare a minute to clean your ears? Take a one-minute vacation from the life you are living.

One-minute vacations are unedited recordings of somewhere, somewhen. Sixty seconds of something else. Sixty seconds to be someone else."
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This Monday, October 24th, The QA features a recording I made a couple of weeks ago. If you've read my previous post, you'll know that I was lucky enough to attend The Third Coast Festival in Chicago last weekend. What you may not know is that Quiet American aka Aaron Ximm was the first audio artist/producer/documentarian to get me to think differently about sound/noise. At Third Coast, he talked to an attentive group (myself included) about appreciating sound for "non-pragmatic" purposes. He loves listening to the world for the sake of listening; not necessarily using field recordings to further conventional narrative as is often done in most of the things I post on this blog. He spoke very articulately about his life in sound while still saying things like, "brain dump." It was an honor to finally meet him.


You can listen to his beautiful memories in sound here

floating on sound waves and swimming in ear candy

Tomorrow marks the beginning of The Third Coast International Audio Festival. I've registered, paid, made sleeping and transportation arrangements, packed some clean underwear, saved an apple for the train to Chicago, and told my teachers that I'd be out of class until Monday. That means all I have left to do is enjoy the weekend's sessions.

Neal Pollack Takes on America

Two summers ago I read The Neil Pollack Anthology of American Literature.

This piece from Transom.org is about the experimental, self-funded book tour he went on with his wife a while ago. Captured within the book and this radio piece is spontaneity, belching, beer, love, creativity, hope, gucci, venice beach and middle-aged woman. I tried to listen to this while falling asleep, but I was laughing too hard. Take this aural journey through the western united states and feel elated and joyful that

a) the Pollack book was written and published in the first place
b) a radio producer spent many many hours creating such an awesome audio artifact
AND
c) you're alive!

when i cannot sing my heart, i can only speak my mind

This is why I listen. John Ono Lennon (((Hearing Voices)))

I'm not really sure how to, but Beatles lover/scholar/teacher Glenn Gass is amazing at articultating his love for the group. you can listen here to an interview I did with him last year.

cageism

``The first question I ask myself when something doesn't seem to be beautiful is why do I think it's not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason."