Based on a conversation with Edna Wofford about ESP, dreams and intuition. From the 2003 CD, Mayor of the Tennessee River. Artist David Greenberger of Duplex Planet has been collecting the thoughts, memories and stories from elderly Americans for more than a quarter century.
From birth, a young Native American has been bleeding from his chest. The government keeps him locked in a cell, refusing to heed his uncle’s warnings. A 3D ZBS adaptation of Cherokee writer Craig Strete’s short story from The Bleeding Man and Other Science Fiction Stories.
La Llorona — the weeping woman — is the Mexican equivalent of the bogeyman. The man she loved rejected her, in madness she drowned her children, then herself. Now she roams the night wailing “Aaay, Mis Hijos;” a scary story that keeps children from wandering at night: “La Llorona will get you.”
“I Want to Bite Your Hand” (2:03 excerpt) Gene Moss (MP3J mashup)
Gene Moss’s 1964 Beatles parody mixed w/ SFX by MP3J. Full vers at Mashuptown, “I Want to Bite Your Hand”” (2:50 mp3):
“Jesus and I Go to Hell” (6:48) found-sound
From a cassette tap found by The Professor of WFMU (mp3) & TheAudioKitchen.net. A video vers with images added by Kenneth Salt: More…
Draw some lines and feel the ping: BallDroppings is a geometric music maker.
It’s built with the open-source Processing java software, “a programming language, development environment, and online community that since 2001 has promoted software literacy within the visual arts.” Check this other Processing production: Bicycle Built for 2000 with “over 2000 human voices recorded via the Internet, assembled to sing” a song. (Interview w/ programmer.)
Sez Gizmodo:
I can think of no finer way to waste Friday afternoon than spending 10 minutes of the company’s time watching bullets striking various objects at one million frames per second… For a special treat, load the clip around 7:30 in to watch what happens when a hollow point bullet strikes what looks like cement.
1 million fps Slow Motion video of bullet impacts made by Werner Mehl from Kurzzeit
That’s a 7mm hunting bullet hitting a target at 603 m/s and a 7mm hollow point at 595 m/s, filmed by Kurzzeit, makers of “Professional measurement equipment” in Germany. They’ve posted several High Speed Videos, and there’s more high speed slow motion in Matt Rece’s video gallery.
The Kitchen Sisters are looking for stories and images and videos and writings.
We’re launching a new multimedia series on NPR this January, a listener collaboration in the tradition of Hidden Kitchens, Lost & Found Sound, and The Sonic Memorial Project. This one’s about girls. Girls and the women they become. Stories of coming of age, rituals and rites of passage, secret identities. Of women who crossed a line, broke a trail, changed the tide.
Small everyday stories, dramatic life and death stories. Stories from the middle of the city, to the middle of nowhere.
What women should we know about? What girl’s story should we tell? The famous, the infamous, the unknown, the untold. Women with public lives. Women with secret lives.
Call our NPR Storyline at 202-408-9576 and tell us your story, or the story of someone we need to chronicle. Or email us at kitchen@kitchensisters.org
And here’s The Contest. We want you to help us name this new NPR series. We’ve called it The Secret Life of Girls Around the World, The Scheherazade Project, 1001 Stories, all names we like but can’t go with for one reason or another. So, we turn to you to join our brainstorming sessions. You can call or email us with your suggestions. Whoever picks the title will be featured on our website, get the full line of Kitchen Sisters products and productions, a wild boar dinner with forager, Angelo Garro, and the deep satisfaction of hearing the title you came up with on NPR throughout the year.
This soon-to-be-titled project will be full of richly layered sound and striking images, created by people around the world who help capture these stories of eccentric, trailblazing women and ground-breaking girls.
Join The Kitchen Sisterhood and help launch this new multimedia collaboration.
WMFU’s Blog posted Loony Tunes for Kooky Times (MP3s), 21 tunes about being loosing it, done by everyone from Dolly Parton to Dinah Washington, Screaming Jay Hawkins to The Sensational Alex Harvey. “They’re Coming to Take Me Away Ha-Haaa!” is there, by Napoleon XIV (“I know you laughed. I heard you laugh. You laughed, you laughed and laughed and then you left. But now you know I’m utterly mad.”) As is Lenny Bruce’s “Psychopathia Sexualis.” And these punk and jazz classics:
A Scott Carrier (2006) article in Mother Jones, “Rock the Junta; In Burma, a band of heavy metal Christians speaks of liberty between the lines”:
Burma is a forgotten country. You might have a hard time finding it on a map, and it may not even be called Burma on the map you’re looking at. It might be called Myanmar, as that’s the official name for it now. It’s an extremely fucked-up place, the size of Texas, located between Thailand and India, south of China. For the past 44 years, it’s been cut off from the rest of the world by a junta of xenophobic and superstitious generals calling themselves the State Peace and Development Council. Others call them mendacious assholes and hungry ghosts.
The sounds of a St. Louis Cardinals’ baseball game are combined with the echoes of Scott Joplin’s ragtime and the distinctive calls of Bushy Wushy the Beer Man. This 39-year veteran beer vendor at Busch Stadium, he shares his love for the game, the crowd, and the communal spirit of St. Louis. Commissioned by Continental Harmony, a partnership of America Composers Forum, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the White House Millennium Council. Performed by Equinox Chamber Players, who premiered the work in their hometown of St. Louis.
“National Anthem” (1990 5:01) Gwen Macsai of Re:sound
Our “Home Team” guest host goes to games at her local minor league stadium, in Prince William, Virginia. After hearing the a host of different folk try to sing the Star-Spangled Banner there, she figures she could do better. That’s where the trouble begins.
“Rookie League” (1989 9:41) Barrett Golding
At the Helena Brewers ballpark in Montana, teens and early twenty-somethings get their first, and for most their only, taste of playing of pro baseball.
“Dug-Out” (1993 27:15) Terry Allen
The fictionalized history of two people: a man born in the late 1800s who runs away from home to play baseball, and a woman born in the early 1900s in a half-dugout (a small house partially built into the side of a slope or hill), who grows up to be a piano player and a beautician. Told by Terry Allen, Jo Harvey Allen, and Katie Koontz, with music by Terry Allen. Commissioned in 1993 by New American Radio. (“Radio Memories” self-interview with Terry Allen.)
At this summer’s World Science Festival, Bobby McFerrin plays with the pentatonic scale and audience participation during the session “Notes & Neurons: In Search of the Common Chorus”:
Right Here, Right Now is an evening with sound-artist Aaron Ximm (aka, quiet american), Oct 29 at the Headlands Center for the Arts (Sausalito, CA):
2009 AIR Aaron Ximm creates intimate, site-specific sound installations that translate fleeting moments captured by field recordings into present experiences.
He’ll also present 24 channels of sound Oct 18 at HeadlandsFall Open House.
As paredes têm ouvidos (“The walls are listeningâ€) Aaron Ximm’s 2007 site-specific sound installation, Lisbon, Portugal
“As Parades Tem Ouvidos – Nature (Collage C)” recordings made within the walls of Nodar, on the theme of nature sounds (6:17 mp3):
REAPER is a small filesize (4M win, 7M mac) multi-track audio DAW, “a complete multitrack audio and MIDI recording, editing, processing, mixing, and mastering environment.” Free trial; if you use it,tell us how it’s working for you.
Just got the new Funny Car flyer from Drag Racing Underground. Reminded me of their musical side, the band Big Stick. Their tunes are audio auto crashups, fusing dragster sounds, race track announcers, race engine specs, driver intervus, and full throttle rock n’ roll.
Their 1895 sonic salute to summer, “Drag Racing,” went top ten in the U.K.. The tune was one of the select singles in John Peel’s Record Box. And its lyrics are a single line of pure poetry: “In the summer I wear my tube top, and Eddie takes me to the drag strip.”
Suppose they gave a Town Hall, and a Tea Party showed up. Excerpts for 2009 health care collective chaos…
Town Halls 2009
Note: While HV may not agree with the sentiments expressed, we do love lively freedom of expression.
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. See playlist- Town Halls 2009 (videos).
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.”
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
“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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
A road trip along historic route 66 in New Mexico, exploring America’s past and present. Tour includes a Santa Fe cooking class, a hot air balloon ride above Albuquerque, Acoma tribal traditions, a mining museum in Grants and a historic hotel in Gallup. Aired on NPR All Things Considered; by producer Jake Warga, “Route 66 Postcard” (8:20 mp3):
Hearing Voices from NPR®
The 
Call our NPR Storyline at 202-408-9576 and tell us your story, or the story of someone we need to chronicle. Or email us at 
Join The Kitchen Sisterhood and help launch this new multimedia collaboration.
WMFU’s Blog posted 
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REAPER
The 
Just got the new Funny Car flyer from
Suppose they gave a Town Hall, and a Tea Party showed up. Excerpts for 2009 health care collective chaos…
