Welcome to The Listening Post, where each week we get an insight into the radio listening habits of a guest contributor. Once each person has made their picks, we ask them to nominate someone for the following week's Listening Post...
Last week, after being nominated by Eleanor McDowall, a Senior Production at Falling Tree Productions, Michael Umney, Production Manager at London community art radio station Resonance 104.4 FM chose his selections. They included Farming Today on BBC Radio 4 and Geoffrey Hill’s Oxford Poetry Podcasts. You can view his full selections here.
For this week's Listening Post, Michael has nominated Rosanna Arbon, an independent producer and curator for In The Dark's listening events in London. In The Dark is a collaborative project which aims to change the way people think about spoken-word radio by lifting it out of its traditional settings.
Check out Rosanna's selections below...
Radio as Spaces of Synthesis & Exhibition
1. Interruptions, Radio Web MACBA
"Think of it as a meditation, go with it, you are in very capable hands. Described as an ‘à-la-carte music format’ in which RWM’s regular curators ‘have carte blanche to create a purely musical experience with only one guiding parameter: the thread that runs through must be original and surprising’. The subject matter is diverse - duration, breathing, environment, God, the German home-recording tape scene, sensual mathematics, AM and FM radio emissions, techno-pop in rural Midwestern America and innate rhythms – to name but a few. As I’m listening I’m making connections here there and everywhere. I would urge you to read the contents of the PDF (below the play button) before or during listening because it is mind-expanding to read how these mixes came to be."
>> Listen here
Freedom From Tradition
2. Dead Letters
"Gregory Whitehead talks about radio in the most beautiful and cutting way, he’s equally enchanted and pissed off with the medium, which I can relate to (read more here). Dead Letters is the piece I keep coming back to, produced in collaboration with Susan Stone in 1985 for NPR. Co-starring the Rosetta Stone, the Body of Judy Garland’s Voice, Hitler’s Handwriting, the memory of a Dead War Story, Fake Fingers, Madame de Pompadour’s Green Velvet Datebook, the Tongues of Extinct Dinosaurs, Napoleon’s Truncated Organ and Elena Makropolis. The timing, the musicality, the voices, candid interviews, the connections, the romance in this piece just makes me so happy. It’s perfect. It’s not all that easy to find Gregory’s audio work but a good amount of his back-catalogue is available to listen on Ubuweb.com. Thank heavens."
>> Listen here
People Talk About What They Do All Day
3. Longform Podcast
"I am endlessly fascinated by how and why people do the work that they do and in another time and place I think I might have the capacity to be a writer. The Longform Podcast is essentially conversations about craft and career with non-fiction writers, editors and more recently the odd radio producer. The people Aaron, Max and Evan select to interview are so interesting and I get sent off on so many tangents of research, it is also a great source for tips on different ways to tell stories."
>> Listen here
Knowledge Is Power
4. Savage Lovecast
"I love a talk back show but this is the only one I take seriously. Imagine a world where everyone is open to and even excited about differences in sexuality, where people are passionate about having positive emotional and physical relationships and where frank conversations about identity, sex (and its politics), gender and relationships aren’t condemned, they’re celebrated. That’s where I want to live and so I think this podcast should be mandatory listening for everyone and translated into a dozen languages."
>> Listen here
Almost Completely Understanding
5. Avant-Garde All The Time, Poetry Foundation
"Curated gems and treasures from the on-line archive of the avant-garde – Ubuweb.com. Topics of presentation include Best Decade Ever?, Sounds of Fluxus and The First “Three-dimensional” Magazine?. I don’t know how many people there are out there like me but when I find a piece of radio that I love I listen to it again and again and again. I have been listening to this same series since 2009 because Kenneth Goldsmith and Curtis Fox only made 16 episodes, so this is like a Greatest Hits of the Avant-Garde for me and I have the whole of Ubuweb for everything else. It’s going to take me until the end of my life to listen to it all."
>> Listen here
Next Week's Listening Post...
"My first pick was from Radio Web MACBA, the online audio site from the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art and it was very difficult for me to make just one selection from this incredible site. I can’t quite comprehend why other major art institutions haven’t gone down a similar route in their production of audio content but then again none of them have Anna Ramos on their team, who I’ve nominated for the next Listening Post. Anna has turned Radio Web MACBA into an incomparable source for intelligent, ardent and leftfield content about contemporary thinking in sound, composition and art. It reflects and compliments the work that the MACBA does, and the exhibitions it curates, beautifully. One of the keys to its success is, I think, that the majority of its producers are not from a traditional radio background. They are instead informed and obsessive insiders who just happen to be very good at audio production and it can’t go without saying, do this with the guidance and support from its executive producers, Anna Ramos, Matias Rossi, Roc Jimenez de Cisneros."
Check back next Friday for Anna's selections...
