Season One Recap

January 25, 2019 |

It’s T minus one week and counting until the Launch of Phantom Power Season Two! We can’t wait to share this season’s shows on auditory psychology, animal sound art, radio drama mashups, ritual poetry, and more. As always, we’ll interview performers and scholars at the cutting edge of sound, but you don’t need to be an expert to enjoy podcast—curiosity is the only prerequisite! If you haven’t heard Season One yet, here’s a quick recap of our first seven episodes with links for listening:

1: Dead Air. With fiction writer John Biguenet and poet Rodrigo Toscano, we ponder moments when the air remains unmoved. Sometimes the absence of sound affects us more profoundly than what we can hear.

2: City of Voices. From the echoes of ancient caves to Roman amphitheaters to telephone wires and radio towers, media scholar Shannon Mattern shows us how sonic infrastructures have allowed us to communicate and form communities.

3: Dirty Rat. Sound artist and composer Brian House explores the interdependent rhythms of the body, technology, and the environment. We examine three pieces of Brian’s that take us from the Okavango Delta in Botswana to the underground burrows of New York’s five boroughs.

4: On Listening In. Influential sound composer, media artist and curator Lawrence English talks with us about listening and his reworking of an important work in the fields of musique concrète and field recording, Presque Rienby Luc Ferrari.

5: Ears Racing. We tend to think of race and racism as visual phenomena, but literary scholar Jennifer Stoever challenges white listeners to examine how racism can infect our ears, altering the sound of the world and other people.

6: Data Streams. Philippines sound artist Teresa Barrozo asks what the future sounds like, while Australian acoustic ecologist Leah Barclay explains how she turns the sounds of a nature preserve into streams of sound and data.

7: Screwed and Chopped. Folklorist Langston Collin Wilkins shows us how in the 1990s, many of Houston’s African American residents customized cars and customized the sound of hip hop. Their “slabs” swerved a slow path through the city streets, banging out a distinctive local music that paid tribute to those very same streets and neighborhoods.