Category: Allen, Mark/Archives

HV091- Bad Trip

Tony Buba next to a closed steel millHearing Voices from NPR®
091 Bad Trip: Your Next Vacation
Host: Larry Massett of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2011-06-22 (Originally: 2010-05-19)

“Bad Trip” (52:00 mp3):

Offbeat retreats and obscure tours thru the heart of Americana:

“Losing It at Universal Studios” (4:37) Mark Allen

Temporarily insanity during a tour of Universal Studios in southern California. So many cool things to see, to do, to tour. The writer is overwhelmed by the magnificence of it all, and pretty much loses his mind. Based an Mark Allen’s web essay “I Suffered Stendhal Syndrome At Universal Studios Hollywood!.”

“Harping Boontling” (8:20) Ginna Allison

Boonville is a small community in Northwest California, founded in 1862, a few hundred feet in elevation, with few hundred residents. And… the town has it’s own language, Boontling. We go sharkin’ and harpin’ thru Boonville with Charles C. Adams, author of Boontling: An American Lingo.

“Tibetan Monks in the Rockies” (7:19) Scott Carrier

Traveling America’s Intermountain West with a group of visiting Buddhist monks: sand paintings and ski hills, prayers, politics and mountain passes.

“Braddock: City of Magic” (1992 / 24:18) Long Haul Productions: Place Portraits

“David Lynch goes into clean neighborhoods and finds the germs and bugs beneath; I go into dirty neighborhoods and find the life.” That’s how filmmaker Tony Buba describes his twelve documentaries about his hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania. Buba is the son of Italian immigrants, part of the wave of Europeans who came to America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to work in the steel mills of Braddock and other towns around Pittsburgh. Now the steel industry is almost dead, and Braddock is the prototypical post-industrial “‘rust belt” town, a town where a person either lives by his or her wits or lives in poverty. Buba tours through the streets of Braddock, past the old Croatian and Slovak social clubs and through streets, now empty, that once bristled with activity.

From LHP’s series of radio works: Place Portraits. Music: “The Very Thought Of You,” instrumental version by Eddie Lockjaw Davis off the 2006 compilation Jazz For Lovers, and Elvis Costello singing on Marian McPartland’s 2006 Piano Jazz: McPartland/Costello.

HV072- Predator

Rupe and Joe LaRock with their deer.Hearing Voices from NPR®
072 Predator: Hunter and Hunted
Host: Larry Massett of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2011-09-14 (Originally: 2009-10-14)

“Predator” (52:00 mp3):

For the opening of hunting season:

“What Big Teeth You Have” (13:28) Hillary Frank

A teenage babysitter convinces his younger siblings he’s a werewolf… who’s going to kill them, produced by Hillary Frank (author of I Can’t Tell You) for This American Life.

“Beatrice” (6:08) Mark Allen

Beatrice is a white toy poodle, a neighbor, and “the most evil entity, force, energy known to man. Death to humans is a mere plop of a pebble in the ocean that is the evil that you are Beatrice. Evil Beatrice the white poodle.”

Long vers (6:58 mp3):

Grizzly Bear 0:00-0:17
Harbor Seal 0:17-0:33
Dall’s Sheep 0:33-0:44
Timber Wolf 0:44-0:51
Moose 0:51-1:22
Cougar/Mountain Lion 1:22-1:26
Sea Lion 1:26-1:51
Porcupine 1:51-1:58
Bison 1:58-3:26
Ringtail/Rodent 3:26-3:41
Musk Ox 3:41-4:11
Columbia Black Tail Deer 4:11-4:37
Caribou 4:37-5:06
Coyote 5:06-5:25
Mountain Goat 5:25-5:48
Peccary 5:48-6:26
Mule Deer 6:26-6:58

From Sonic Scenery, an exhibit I worked on at the natural history museum in Los Angeles a couple years ago. Composers were invited to record music specifically to be heard in wings of the museum. The visitor wears a headset, which plays the compositions when triggered by remote signals in the galleries. Experimental duo Matmos took it all the way by making audio environments for each of the seventeen dioramas in the North American Mammals hall. The timechart (above) was intended to cue the visitor to move from one window to the next, but you can read along for a similar effect.

Artist statement:
In general, our work starts by taking an object, making sounds with that object, and working outward from those sounds in a free-associative manner, without a preconceived result or specifically targeted genre in mind.

In this case, we have had to reverse this process and have tried to think about the precise specifics of the North American Mammals hall and work to gather sounds that will evoke both the natural locale and the specific behaviors of the animals in the room. We decided to anchor our piece around the sounds of animals eating, breathing, and sniffing their environment, and to locate these noises of animal life against a backdrop of plateaulike drones generated with musical instruments associated with “Americana”: pedal steel, acoustic guitar, banjo, harmonica, and autoharp. Feeding peanut butter to a friend’s dog, we built up a basic library of mammalian lip-smacking, huffing, barking, whining, sniffling, and breathing noises, and combined this with a percussive battery of antler noises made by smacking deer antlers against each other and some softer rustling textures harvested by stroking and rubbing the pelt of a wolf.

The work is divided into miniature ‘cells,’ which stand in for the seventeen distinct dioramas/environments and animal species represented in the room, and this is split down the middle by a central section that corresponds to the large bison display at the far end of the room. Our work is intended to be a sound map of a walk through this room and is paced to coincide with a five-to-seven-minute counterclockwise walk through its contents
–Matmos

via futurechimp

“17 Species of North American Mammals” (2:22 excerpt) Matmos

LA’s The Natural History Museum commissioned original music compositions to accompany their 2006 exhibit Sonic Scenery: Music for Collections. Matmos’ music used the vocal sounds of North American mammals.

“The Loaves And The Fishes (7:24) Long Haul Productions

One of America’s oldest roadside attractions is the Linesville Spillway in northwest Pennsylvania. Tourists toss bread; carp amass at the spillway’s edges: The fish are so thick that mallard ducks hop, skip and jump on the fish’s backs to compete for a slice of bread. Original music by Tim Fite, part of LHP’s song/story series.

“Bread In The Water” (2:14 excerpt) Tim Fite

More music from the LHP story.

“Elk Calls” (2:44) Barrett Golding & Colter Langan

Writer (Amazon), hunter, angler, outdoorsman, Norman Strung demonstrates the shrill sound and thrill found in calling for elk. (Miss ya, Norm: “Labradors [are] lousy watchdogs. They usually bark when there is a stranger about, but it is an expression of unmitigated joy at the chance to meet somebody new, not a warning.” –Norman Strung)

“The Rut” (2:44) Erica Heilman

Father Rupe LaRock and son Joe provide a hunter’s perspective of the annual deer breeding cycle. “You can just smell the heat and smell the rut right in the air.” Another of the Deer Stories , produced with Gregory Sharrow at the Vermont Folk Life Center.

“Idaho Hunting Camp” (12:00) Alex & Carolyn Chadwick

Guns, guitars, guts, and wild game. Hunting wildlife and the wild life in the mountains of Payette National Forest. From the Chadwick’s Conservation Sound series. Audio by Micheal Scweppe.

HV011- Road Trip

Larry driving with his dog BoHearing Voices from NPR®
011 Road Trip: Travelers’ Tales
Host: Larry Massett of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2009-5-27 (Originally: 2008-05-14)

“Road Trip” (54:00 mp3):

Host Larry Massett spends a “Long Day on the Road” with ex-KGB in the Republic of Georgia.

Scott Carrier starts in Salt Lake and ends on the Atlantic in this cross-country “Hitchhike.”

Lemon Jelly adds beats to the life of a “Ramblin’ Man.”

Writer/singer Willie Vlautin with his band band Richmond Fontaine sends musical postcards from the flight of “Walter On the Lam.”

And Mark Allen tells a tale of a tryst with a “Kinko’s Crackhead.”

Gay Football

Dallas Cowboys stadiumThis was scheduled to run on last Friday’s NPR All Things Con, but got canceled last minute — we’re still not sure why. That’s no reason y’all shouldn’t hear it, tho.

So here’s something for those who think this week’s “Super” ends not in “Tuesday” but in “bowl.” A gay man crosses the line into unexplored fields, “For once in my life I wanted to watch an entire football game intently.” Mark Allen (from his “The Homosexual Brain” blog-post) with “Gays & Football” (2:05 mp3):