HV093- Lewis & Clark Trail II

Hearing Voices from NPR®
093 Lewis & Clark Trail II: The Columbia River
Host: Barrett Golding of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2010-06-23

“Lewis & Clark Trail II” (52:00 mp3):

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Biking & Mic-ing the Lewis & Clark Trail; part 2 (of 2), from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean:

Chief Mountain Hotshots, Nicole Meeso and Aldon Wells, Powell Campground ID — Getting ready for a day’s work in the Clearwater Forest with the Blackfeet wildland firefighters, known as some of the best in the world.

Sister Carol Ann and the Bendictine Sisters, St. Gertrude Monastery, Cottonwood ID — Land stewardship is a matter of faith in these sisters’ rural Catholic perspective. We walk thru the woods of the monastery; 800 acres which the sisters have had to learn how to manage.

Horace Axtell, Nez Perce leader, Lewiston ID — Nez Perce Bones: tribal elder, spiritual leader, and the last fluent speaker of the Nez Perce language. Co-author of A Little Bit of Wisdom: Conversations With a Nez Perce Elder.

Lois & Betty, Patterson Restaurant, Patterson WA — Sipping coffee and surveying farm life from the breakfast tables of a small town cafe.

Louis Butler and family, Walla Walla River WA — Four Generations Fishing: A retiree from Hanford Nuclear Reservation goes catfishing with his daughter, grand-daughter and great-grandsons.

Ken Karzmiski, Archeologist, Columbia Gorge Discovery Center, The Dalles WA — Looking for lost Lewis & Clark legacy, and the artifacts and languages of native cultures drowned by the Columbia River dams.

USCG Duty Surfman Kyle Betts, now Chief Boatswain’s Mate and Executive Petty Officer, Cape Disappointment U.S. Coast Guard Station WA — The USCG Search and Rescue team pulls boats and people out of treacherous West coast waters along the Columbia River bar, where the river meets the ocean: “the graveyard of the Pacific.”

An earlier pedal over the same route, from the Rocky Mountains, down the Columbia River to the Pacific Ocean, interviewing whoever crosses our path: wind surfers, church organists, forest service employees, and “we’ve been talking to as many loggers as we can, to try and find out if they don’t see bicyclists, or they just hate us.”

The first movement in From the Journals of Lewis and Clark, a symphonic work for orchestra and choir based on the expedition’s journals. Montana’s Great Falls Symphony commissioned University of Idaho music professor Dan Bukvitch as the composer. The text is President Jeffersons’s instructions to Captain Lewis in 1803.

Listen to Part One. And read more on the Lewis & Clark Trail and our bike trip.

HV092- Lewis & Clark Trail I

Hearing Voices from NPR®
092 Lewis & Clark Trail I: The Missouri River
Host: Barrett Golding of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2010-06-16

“Lewis & Clark Trail I” (52:00 mp3):

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Biking & Mic-ing the Modern Lewis & Clark Trail; part one of two, up the Missouri River into the Rocky Mountains. Barrett Golding and Josef Verbanac, a radio producer and an English professor, a Jew and a Souix, bicycle from Missouri to Montana, enduring floods, war, worms, mud, and myriad Lewis & Clark festivals:

Prep: Cross-country preparations, then and now, from Penis syringes and Indian presents, to AAA and GPS. “Your observations are to be taken with great pains and accuracy, for others as well as yourself” –Jefferson’s Instructions to Lewis, 1803.

Flood: Missouri floodwaterss, a frog symphony, a million worms, bowfishing a beanfield, and in Marthasville MI little league it’s Lemke Trenching and Excavating vs. Miller Funeral Homes. Don Sherman, a retired Chrysler worker, who now volunteers his time taking care of the city park in the flood-prone landmark rural town — which, in Lewis & Clark’s time, was the last outpost of white society. And we go bow-fishing for in a bean field.

Rendezvous: Biking and mic-ing the Missouri River. Captain Lewis’ Aria, surveyor-stalking cougars, black powder bursts, cave wall Manitous, and Edens lost. Explorers express emotions and the Expedition breaks into song, in “Corps of Discovery: An Opera in Three Acts” produced by music professor Eric Dillner and the University of Missouri’s Show-Me Opera. Geographer James Harlan maps the Two Missouris, the Missouri Territory now and two centuries ago, using an 1815 Land Office survey and Clark’s field-notes. James Denny, Historic Interpreter, for Missouri’s Department of Natural Resources, points out where pictografs on a cliff were a landmark of the Lower Missouri, until the railroad blew ‘em up; we tour through the tunnel of the ex-Manitous.

Wars: No Home on the Range, Chief Joseph’s Race Track, and Brothers Buddha and Brahma. Farrell Adkins, Campground Host at Arrow Rock MO sings the little known second verse of “Home on the Range.” Matt Nowak, Natural Resources Director at Fort Leavenworth Army Base KA describes this places part in the death and desctrution of the Nez Perce people.

Indian County: Daily pow-wows, casino economies, and Lewis’ birthday gloom. Neil Phillips, Penobscot tribal member and former canoe racer paddles from Maine to Montana, experiencing life on the river, a little-seen view of America. Joe Verbancec Sr. tours us thru the Standing Rock reservation.

The Strenuous Life: Bruce Kaye, Chief Naturalist at Theodore Roosevelt National Park recounts Teddy Roosevelt’s time in North Dakota. His ideas about conservation developed in the badlands, then get expressed in the acts of the President of the United States and the start of the National Park system.

Re-enaction: At Coal Banks Landing, on Missouri River “Breaks” in Montana, we encounters the re-reactors, traveling up-river using the boats, clothes, food, guns and knifes of the Lewis & Clark era.

Camp: Lewis and Clark made 600 campsites on their expedition from St. Louis to the Pacific and back. So far, the exact location of only one has been identified. For 13 years, archaeologist Ken Karsmizki has been digging at Lower Portage camp of the Great Falls, on the Missouri River in Central Montana, and finding fire pits, butchered bones, wooden stakes and other artifacts, all dating to Lewis and Clark’s time.

Orchestration: “From the Journals of Lewis and Clark” is a symphonic work for orchestra and choir based on the expedition’s journals. Montana’s Great Falls Symphony commissioned University of Idaho music professor Daniel Bukvich as the composer, whose job was to make Art imitate History.

Listen to Part Two. And read more on the Lewis & Clark Trail and our bike trip.

HV006- Radio Dial

Hearing Voices from NPR®
006 Radio Dial: Signals from the Sky
Host: Barrett Golding of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2010-05-26 (Originally: 2008-04-09)

“Radio Dial” (52:00 mp3):

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Radio stories about radio, then stories about radio stories:

These “Dueling Transmitters” are an atmospheric found-sound un-manipulated mix of Spanish ham-radio operators, slow Morse code, data squalls, and the Voice of the Islamic Republic of Iran. From the Shortwavemusic blog post “The Effects of Radiation.”

An FM radio station in Uruguay’s capital, Montevideo, is called Urbana. It’s hip, bilingual, plays music from all over the world, and is famous in Uruguay for its 30-second sound portraits featuring the voices of famous people mixed over avante-garde music.

The Cuban a-capella ensemble approximates a radio dial with their vocal chords. From the group Vocal Sampling’s (site | space) CD Una Forma Mas.

Shortwave/music mixes by LA sound artist Myke Dodge Weiskopf, off his 30: a Retrospective 1976-2006

The government’s all-time all-the-time radio station goes commercial, voiced by former WWV announcer John Doyle.

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HV051- Dog Tales

Hearing Voices from NPR®
051 Dog Tales: Barks, Bites, Best Friends
Host: Barrett Golding of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2010-04-07 (Originally: 2009-02-18)

“Dog Tales” (52:00 mp3):

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A canine compilation — the dogs have their day:

The producer plays frisbee with a sightless German shepherd.

This commentator can’t connect with his family’s canine, off his collection of Stories off the Shallow End.

A musician mixes a multi-bark audio art composition.

In 1984 people told producer about their dogs and their dog’s dreams, produced with Christina Eggloff for their series Animals and Other Stories, with funds from the New York State Council for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.

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Distro Dancing

A 2-article rundown on distributing pubradio programs, and the $s involved, is published in AIRblast: Part I and Part II. Features lotsa intervus with producers and program directors. Evals who’s buying what for how long and how much. And it’s loaded w/ how-tos, data, and personal perspectives on PRSS and PRX.

Producer Nancy Solomon recently posted her first piece on PRX: “The interface works great; I was pleasantly surprised how easy it was. Their help desk was super helpful and easy to get a hold of. I like the way the page looks; I like the way it’s laid out and the flexibility the format gives you to put both segments and whole pieces up. I was also amazed and pleased at how accessible John Barth was to talk about how best to promote the show.”

So, if a radio piece falls in the PRX forest, will a PD hear the sound? Not always. “Producers putting stuff on PRX is like thousands of crack addicts selling their junk on street corners,” says Charles Lane, producer, WHSU News reporter, and former PRX election curator. “We’re just curious street exhibits with sad eyes hoping programmers might spot our wares, as they race to wherever they’re going.”

But what producers really want to know is: How’s it work? And: How rich will I get?

HV085- Protest

Hearing Voices from NPR®
085 Protest: From the National Mall to Town Halls
Host: Barrett Golding of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2010-03-24

“Protest” (52:00 mp3):

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Complaining about the government is an American pastime. We hear protest music and mashups; we go to protest marches, from Vietnam War era actions on the National Mall, to modern-day Tea Parties and Town Halls:

Protest used to be mainly for the young and left-leaning, but recently older right-wingers have joined the party — the Tea Party. When Congressmen went home in 2009, this is what they heard from constituents. Music: Jeff Arntsen, mix: Robin Wise, audio: excerpted from YouTube videos.

A sound collage of protests and protest music over the past 40 years

The popular Burmese rock band Iron Cross is using music to challenge the nation’s infamously repressive regime. In the great tradition of rock and roll, Iron Cross is taking on Burma’s military government with song.

Music made from field recordings at 2003 anti-war protests. MP3s at Hawks and Sparrows:

…originally existed as an edition of 100 cd-rs packaged individually with the first flowers of spring in clear glass cases. the audio on each disk is made up of reconstructions and rearrangements of field recordings from 4 anti-war protests (seattle, new york, philadelphia, and washington dc) that took place in the late winter of 2003, with a specific intent to remove any rhetoric, any dogma, incantations, chants, or spoken language of any sort, and leave musical constructions culled from in-between pauses, whistles and yells, drums, sirens, helicopters, electric hums, boomboxes, etc… distributed by reverse shoplifting, filed under “h” in a store near you. never pay for this cd.

In Fall 2009, President Obama flew into Bozeman, Montana. He gave a health care talk… in an airplane hanger. The protesters were kept a half-mile away from the airport, in a field — what the Police called a “free-speech zone.” The local Tea Party had reserved it, but plenty of single payer advocates also showed up. There were dueling megaphones, simul-chanting, and even some level-headed discussions. Voices include Chief Bill Dove, Linda Kenoyer, Tom Hunter, Don McClarty, Bob Adney, Alene Brackman, John Chaffer, Kent Madin, Lance Craighead, Henry Kriegel, Joanne Kessler, Tammy Hall, and Bob Folsick.

Every day protesters take over Zocalo plaza in Oaxaca City, Mexico; recorded for quiet american in 2003.

From May 3 1971, an excerpt from All Things Considered’s first broadcast. The debut program takes to the DC streets to cover that day’s anti-war (Vietnam) actions. Host Robert Conley describes “the crush, catcalls, flux and flow of the demonstrations in Washington.” Reporter Jeff Kamen bears witness: “Today in the nation’s capital, it is a crime to be young and have long hair.” Directed by Bill Siemering.

Based on a recording of protest against Iraq War, New York, March 2003. Written/produced/performed by Bob Goldberg/BAN Radio “Orchestra”, 2003 (and of Famous Accordions). MP3 found at Another Protest Song.

“Town Halls 2009″

Audio/Video Production: Barrett Golding
Music: Jeff Arntsen
Audio mix: Robin Wise
Video clips: ABC World News, WGNO- New Orleans, David William Hedrick, The Young Turks, Hot Air Pundit Kathy Castor, Hill Newspaper, YouTube. Video playlist- Town Halls 2009 (videos).

HV084- Place Your Bets

Hearing Voices from NPR®
084 Place Your Bets: What Happens in Vegas
Host: Alex Chadwick of Conservation Sound
Airs week of: 2010-02-17

“Place Your Bets” (52:00 mp3):

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We play keno, cards and craps in Sin City:

Up all night in America’s gambling Mecca: Vegas, baby.

A classical composition, in three parts, for strings, winds, and an interview with Tom Martinet, who trained to be a priest, but, instead, started working Nevada dice tables. Premiered 1997 in Vegas, performed by Sierra Wind Quintet. Re-released on PKB’s 2006 Larkin Gifford’s Harmonica.

An NPR hosts pits his wits against the regulars at a downtown small-town casino. Guess who wins. Produced by Carolyn Jensen; sound engineer by Michael Schweppe.

An excerpt from Joe’s hour “Zen” in his series The Other Side. What happened in Vegas… definitely didn’t stay in Vegas. Getting on the wrong side of Sin City’s collection crew.

Jazz bassist Kelly Roberti (David Murray Quintet) lost his bass to the keno machines. He kicked the habit; the scars remain, but the bass is back. Kelly was a 2010 Governor’s Arts Awards winner.

A radio drama written for Ridley’s 2001 LA Series on NPR Morning Edition. Performers are Bob Wisdom, Yang Chee, and Jim Wallace (script).

Above photo of the Las Vegas sign by Kcferret, June 2005.

Life with Coal

HV contributed to a half-hour doc produced by Eric Mack for High Plains News We Shall Remain – Life with and after coal (also on PRX).

Our’s is the Colstrip MT section that starts the show.

Colstrip MT- Coal-fired power plant