HV on Haitus

Our weekly hour series, Hearing Voices from NPR, has come to its end of days.

Many of the 150 outstanding HV hours will live on in the PRX archives.

Many thanks:

• To the 100+ brave stations that carved out a place on their airwaves for adventurous audio.
• To the 200+ producers whose amazing pieces aired in our hours.
• To NPR for supporting us from the start, and sticking with us all four years of our series.
• To the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for our initial funding and to the National Endowment for the Arts for their continued support.

We’ve had a blast assembling the work of indies and NPR into these “sixty-minute streams of driveway moments.” We’re proud of our Peabody and other awards. We’ve loved the thousands of emails and site comments listeners have sent us. But all good things…

So, to you, our site visitors: Thanks for helping propagate outrageous radio.

HV142- Solidod

Hearing Voices from NPR®
142 Solidod: An Apache Original
Host: Larry Massett of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2012-09-26

“Solidod” (52:00 mp3):

The Life and Times of Solidod, the last remaining member of her village of Mescalero Apache who lived on the edge of Death Valley. HV editor Larry Massett helped our friend Solidad publish her new e-book, An Apache Original: The Life and Times of Solidod.

Larry composed and performed the piano music in this radio hour.

Solidod is in her 80s and tells about 300 years of her life stories in the book. Here’s an excerpt from Larry’s…

Introduction

When I first met Solidod she was living alone in a tiny room in a rather depressing subsidized-income apartment complex in Florida. She herself was anything but depressing, though. A few minutes after we met she showed me the little knife she carries with her in her buckskin purse. “But Solidod,” I said, “that’s kind of a dangerous knife, isn’t it?” I said- meaning, dangerous for an 80-year woman. “Yeah, it’s sharp,” she laughed, “but it would be better if it was rusty. So the cut would get infected in case I stab somebody.”

Wow, tough lady. Tough, but also funny, curious, brimming with energy, and a world-class storyteller. As she told me about the adventures of her life I realized she’s been everywhere and done just about everything: horse-trainer, bodyguard, trans-Atlantic sailor, carpenter, gardener, artist, you name it. And she’s busy. She spends her days zipping around town selling the t-shirts she paints and the jewelry she makes, checking on old friends and chatting up new ones. Most people her age seem to be winding down; Solidod’s just getting started…

Me and my Indian, my husband

Several of Solidod’s paintings grace the book’s pages. The e-book is in Kindle format: Amazon make a free Kindle Reader for nearly every computer, tablet, smartphone, and web browser. More…

HV141- Ayahuasqueros

Hearing Voices from NPR®
141 Ayahuasquereos: Amazon Shamans
Host: Jeremy Narby of Soundwalk Collective
Airs week of: 2012-09-05

“Ayahuasqueros” (52:00 mp3):

An anthropologist’s sound-portrait of the ayahuasca plant and the people of Peru:

In May of 2012, Soundwalk Collective traveled into the heart of the Peruvian Amazon to document the ancient chanting rituals of the Ayahuasquero, the Master Shaman and practitioner of plant medicine. In this ritual, the shaman consumes a potent brew made from the Ayahuasca, a sacred vine of the Amazonian jungle, the “vine of the souls”. The brew induces a powerful psychedelic experience that causes visual and auditory hallucinations.

It is in this state that the Ayahuasquero conjures the “icaro” or magic song.

The icaro is more than song, it is a language through which the shaman communicates with the spirits of plants and animals of the jungle — he speaks through them and they sing through him. There are more than a thousand icaros, through which Ayahuasceros call on the spirits for healing, protection, or attack. Icaros can stun a snake, cure a bite, call the soul back to the body, make a sorcerer fall asleep. Icaros are “pure sound,” melodies abstracted so as to become intangible, to become air. In this intangible and most powerful form icaros allow shamans to swallow darts, visit distant planets, call the rainbow, and kill.

Blowing, rattling leaves and singing are synergistic modes of sound that are, at once verbal, unintelligible and abstract — elevating the song to something transcending language. This piece by Soundwalk Collective documents the ancient practice by inhabiting the Ayahuasquero’s soundscape where the icaros become a visceral, haunting, and consuming listening experience.

“Ayahuasqueros” is a radio essay by anthropologist Jeremy Narby, in collaboration with Francisco Lopez, featuring Victor Nieto and Ushamano Walter Martinez. It was ommissioned by Radio France Culture, mixed by Dug Winningham, and produced by Soundwalk Collective: an international sound-art collective, winner of several Audies for their soundwalks and a Dalton Pen award for the Ground Zero w/ Paul Auster. Since 2000 they “have been sonic nomads, embarking on journeys from the desolate land of Bessarabia to the desert of Rub al Khali. By exploring and documenting the world around them through its sounds, the Collective abstracts and re-composes narrative sound pieces through fragments of reality to form distinct audible journeys.”

AYAHUASQUEROS (Preview) from Soundwalk Collective on Vimeo.

Film by Stephan Crasneanscki

HV140- John Cage

Hearing Voices from NPR®
140 John Cage: September 5 1912 – August 12 1992
Host: Barrett Golding of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2012-08-29

“John Cage” (52:00 mp3):

A tribute to the composer on his 100th birthday:

From a half-hour radio play, commissioned by CBS, written by poet Kenneth Patchen and scored by Cage. Broadcast May 31, 1942 on WBBM radio station (Columbia Broadcasting System in Chicago), as part of their Columbia Workshop series. Performance by Xenia Cage, Cilia Amidon, Stuart Lloyd, Ruth Hartman, Claire Oppenheim and John Cage conducting.

A voxpop variety of folk answer the musical question: “Who’s John Cage?”

Few contemporary composers had the influence of John Cage. From experimental music to minimalism, Brian Eno to George Winston, echoes of John Cage continue to resound to this day, more than 6 decades after his “Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano” were first published. John Cage was a conceptualist of sound who turned even silence into music as he did with his famous piece, 4 minutes and 33 seconds. John cage died from a stroke in August of 1992. But we hear his thoughts in sound from a 1987 interview. From the series Echoes with John Diliberto, part of their Thoughts in Sound specials.

Pianist Stephen Drury performs a 1948 Cage composition; the title track of the album In a Landscape

From the collection A Chance Operation: The John Cage Tribute (this UbuWeb link has free downloads of the entire CD set).

An impressionistic illustration of synchronistic artistic cooperation, in the words of Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham. Interviews by Katie Davis, from Jay Allison’s series Living in the Arts.

More…

HV139- Sports Report

Hearing Voices from NPR®
139 Sports Report: Athletic Endeavor
Host: Barrett Golding of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2012-08-22

“Sports Report” (52:00 mp3):

The producer’s wife likes to swim at night, far out into the lake. She was taught long ago how to effortlessly, and beautifully, skim across the water. Aired originally on This American Life “Lessons“.

Mashup master GHP, aka, Mark Vidler, mixes Queen’s sports stadium classic, “We Will Rock You,” with AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, Crowded House and a bit of Beatles, Outkast, and Snoop Dogg. Download off GHP’s This Was Pop 2002-2007.

The U.S.A Track and Field Hall of Fame commissioned sound-artist Ben Rubin, of EAR Studio, to make audio art from interviews with athletes.

A gay man gets to know the game. Edited from Mark’s essay, Football & the Homosexual Brain.

The producer spent the winter coaching a boys basketball team in her Washington, DC neighborhood. The boys’ grades aren’t good enough to play for the school, so they join a local church league. And Katie Davis starts more as counselor than coach. Originally aired on NPR. Part of the producers Neighborhood Stories series.

From the soundtrack to Spike Lee’s film, off the album Power To The People And The Beats – Public Enemy’s Greatest Hits [Explicit] (also: clean version). Features Voices Of Shabach Community Choir Of Long Island, Stephan Stills and samples from his Buffalo Springfield song, “For What it’s Worth.”

Spin class gets personal, with Chet Siegel as Sam, Emily Tarver as Lisa, Ed Herbstman as Kirk. Written collaboratively by The Truth, from a story by Chet Siegel. Special thanks: Peter Clowney, Kerrie Hillman, and Chris Bannon. Recorded at WNYC and on location in New York City. The Truth podcast is produced by Jonathan Mitchell (also on PRX.

HV Contributors

Been retrospecting of late about the pool of production talent who’ve made radio waves for Hearing Voices and the Hearing Voices from NPR series — a damn impressive list of audio luminaries:

HV138- Out of the Blocks

Hearing Voices from NPR®
138 Out of the Blocks: One City Block, Everybody’s Story
Host: Aaron Henkin of WYPR-Baltimore
Airs week of: 2012-07-04

“Out of the Blocks” (52:00 mp3):

One hour of radio, one Baltimore city block, everybody’s story:

What does a city block sound like? Aaron Henkin of WYPR-Baltimore and electronic/hip hop musician Wendel Patrick hit the sidewalk, spending several months documenting the stories, voices, and people who populate the 3300 block of Greenmount Avenue, in Baltimore. We go inside the hair salon, the tattoo parlor, and the check cashing business. We talk to a street preacher and homeless street people. This is a community of different nationalities, ethnicities, and religions; in other words: an All American block.

Both producers are Baltimore-based. Aaron Henkin produced the program for the WYPR series he works on, The Signal. This HV hour also features music from co-producer Wendel Patrick’s 2011 album Forthcoming. His 2007 collection is called Sound:.

More…

HV137- In the Mountains

Hearing Voices from NPR®
137 In the Mountains: Towards the Summit
Host: Barrett Golding of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2012-06-20

“In the Mountains” (52:00 mp3):

Heading towards the summit:

Field recordings in the Annapurna region of Nepal near Tibet, including a ceremony for the Buddha’s birthday, a few donkey trains passing in a cacophony of melodious bells; and a five-foot prayer wheel in a Buddhist gompa in Marpha.

From NPR Radio Expeditions, hidden deep in the woods of the Payette National Forest are the terraced remnants of the “Ah Toy Garden” (near the town of Warren, Idaho), now on the National Register of Historic Places. Produced by Carolyn Jensen Chadwick with sound desgin by Michael Scweppe.

When most people are headed to the beach, our producer heads for the ski slopes near his home in Utah. The goal is to find a combination of freezing and thawing in the late spring that gives the mountain snow pack the singular spring skiing experience(on PRX | on NPR).

Attempting to climb the world’s most deadly and second highest demands extreme gear, training, timing, preparation, and a carefully selected team. Joe Frank eschews every bit of that: why make so easy? Excepted from Joe’s hour, Mountain Rain, available on CD and as an MP3. Music: “Buried At Sea” MC 900 Ft Jesus, One Step Ahead of the Spider.

K2 photo courtesy: Kevin Mayea