Negativland:
Mark Hosler, Richard Lyons, Don Joyce and David Wills

Since 1980, the legendary band Negativland has been creating records, fine art, video, books, radio (on KPFA, Berkeley) and live performance using appropriated sound, image and text. Appropriated is the key word here - way before mash-ups were all the rage, Negativland was mixing original materials and music with sources taken from mass culture, to create sharp-witted social commentaries. They call this "culture jamming," and, yes, they’re proud to say they’ve been honored with a lawsuit or two over the years.

Here are just two samples of their work, but we encourage you to listen to more on Negativland's website:

Two favorites from conferences past

Music: A Force for Good (and Sometimes Evil)
Presented by Jad Abumrad

Radio makers have many techniques at their disposal for crafting each story they tell, including one in particular that gets used and abused more than any other: scoring. Music can lift a dreary voice or sink an entire piece, connect listeners to the emotional life of a story or leave them feeling manipulated ... and pissed about it. Radio Lab producer and host Jad Abumrad offers his perspective on how music can help or hurt a story, and in doing so, will quote smart people and play examples of scoring triumphs and tragedies.

New Orleans’ Hurricane Risk
(First aired September 20, 2002 on All Things Considered)
By Daniel Zwerdling

In September of 2002, three years before Katrina devastated America’s gulf coast, veteran NPR reporter Daniel Zwerdling investigated what would happen to New Orleans if it fell in the path of a category 5 hurricane. What he discovered then – predictions of sea water filling the city up like a bowl and residents stranded without an escape route - was so very close to what happened that Zwerdling’s reports sound like an eerie foretelling of the future.

Photo credit: William Brangham for NOW with Bill Moyers

NOTE! Daniel Zwerdling will be leading a session at the the upcoming 2006 Third Coast Festival Conference about how to get dynamite tape from your interviews.

African Feedback
by Alessandro Bosetti

Sound artist Alessandro Bosetti is curious about the musicality of language and the sounds of spoken communication (and miscommunication), and he creates a variety of audio work to that end. For African Feedback, Bosetti traveled in West Africa with a CD player and a selection of experimental, electro-acoustic and improvised music. He played the music through headphones for residents of Dogon and Mossi villages and recorded all of their responses: comments, imitations and silences. Bosetti then used this "feedback," exclusively, to produce this mesmerizing composition about cultural differences, the practice of listening and relationship between voice and song.

Catalogue of Ships: Episode 23
Airplane Safety
by David Terry and Michael Kraskin

Taking its name from the infamous passage in the Iliad where Homer uses over 300 lines to list all the ships in the Greek fleet which sailed to Troy, Catalogue of Ships is about the human attempt to find meaning in the tedious, list-like, largely plot-less world of the everyday. Part theatre, part radio and all original, performer/writer David Terry and composer/sound designer Michael Kraskin produce a series of strange, sound-rich stories that give podcasts a good name. In this epsiode: David learns how to teach pre-schoolers about death. Please put your tray tables in their upright and locked position.

Flux: Episode #9
Roger Dowds, "Millionaire" Winner
by Ronan Kelly

Roger Dowds wasn't exactly an obvious pick for a game show contestant. He'd lived a quiet, sheltered life and had little faith in himself. So it was surprising to everyone, including himself, when he was picked for Ireland’s popular version of “Who Wants to be a Millionaire,” and even more surprising how Dowds changed over the course of the game as his winnings accrued. He explains the transformation, along with some of the darker twists and turns in his life, with astonishing candor and humor on Flux, a new weekly program on Ireland’s RTE 1.

If It Be Your Will
a radio documentary featuring Leonard Cohen
by Kari Hesthamar

Canadian musician Leonard Cohen insists he hardly remembers anything from his past, and that he lives mostly in the present. But over the course of this intimate radio feature by Norwegian producer Kari Hesthamar, Cohen looks back over his life and shares some thoughts about earlier days. Along the way he considers the different paths his career has taken, talks about various creative projects he was (and still is) involved with, and sweetly reminisces about a beautiful young woman he shared some time with on a wild Greek island, who loyal fans will know by the name "Marianne."

The Best Show on WFMU
by Tom Scharpling and Jon Wurster

WFMU is an independent, volunteer-run, listener supported, freeform radio station broadcasting from Jersey City, NJ and every Tuesday night at 8pm Tom Scharpling takes over the airwaves. The Best Show on WFMU is three hours of music, mirth and mayhem, wherein Scharpling conducts interviews, plays music, and opens the phone lines to the listening public. Often on the other end of the line is Jon Wurster, best known as the drummer for the indie rock band Superchunk. But Jon Wurster never admits to being Jon Wurster. Wurster usually pretends to be a ridiculously pompous and ill-informed rock critic, or a grown-up member of an eighties pre-teen punk band, or a middle aged loser looking to fill out the roster for his imaginary supergroup, or some other deluded and pathetic human specimen. Every Tuesday night Scharpling and Wurster take this classic comedy set-up and do something intelligent, cool and unbelievably funny.

We have audio excerpts below of just a few of the Scharpling and Wurster bits. To hear the pieces in their entirety, you can get "Best of" CDs at their record label Stereolaffs.

Mad About Magpies
by Guy Hand

Many people look to the natural world for clues about living a more harmonious life. For example, we aspire to traits we associate with certain animals: the wisdom of the owl, the noble bearing of the bald eagle or the grace of the swan. In Mad about Magpies, producer Guy Hand wonders what nature is trying to teach us when it starts acting like some pushy, poorly socialized uncle, the one with the loud voice who moves in uninvited and threatens to eat everything in sight. This is a look at that much maligned magpie.

How Many Miles to Babylon?
or, 13 Easy Pieces
by Kaye Mortley

Merry-go-rounds often reside deeply in our memories, conjuring childhood and the magical ability to be carried far away in the blink of an eye or the spin of a carousel. How Many Miles to Babylon? navigates between fiction and reality, recalling the past and bringing you along for the ride through the sounds and descriptions of street fairs in Paris, a carefully-remembered traveling circus, the ambling of horses down a street and a tour through a contemporary merry-go-round museum. How many Miles to Babylon? was originally produced for ABC Radio program The Listening Room.

Taken Too Soon: The Cost of War
by Paul Ingles

Nearly 40 public radio producers from around the world lend their voices to this compelling radio meditation featuring some of the names and circumstances of the deaths of coalition forces, Iraqi and Afghan civilians, contractors and journalists killed since the fighting began in Afghanistan in October of 2001 and continuing up to the present day. It was produced as part of Good Radio Shows, Inc.

One- Minute Vacations
Curated by Aaron Ximm

The world makes its own music, but we rarely listen with fresh ears says Aaron Ximm, sound artist, field recordist and founder of quietamerican.org. His site is filled with audio opportunities to armchair travel: to Osaka, Japan to hear the sweet potato vendor's call; to Calcutta to hear workers musically plucking away at manual typewriters; to Duluth, MN to hear the frenetic yelps of sled dogs before they settle down into a focused hush; to name just a few destinations. Each week a new trip is available, in one-minute servings. Ximm asks "surely you can spare a minute to clean your ears? Sixty seconds of something else. Sixty seconds to be someone else."

Here are five joyful One-Minute Vacations, described by the people who recorded them. If you need to know what recording equipment they used, you can find it here. And one more thing, Ximm hopes you'll contribute your own vacation to his site someday.

	Dog Sledding / Duluth, MN Reocrded by Curt Olson Winter is here, and with it: Sled-dog sounds from the 2005 John Beargrease Sled Dog Marathon, an annual race from Duluth to near the Canadian border and back. At a beautiful pine-shrouded checkpoint many sled dogs and mushers are catching a few hours' rest. The dogs bark excitedly until the moment they start down the trail. (11/28/2005)
	Read about the ability of sound, even in one- minute un-edited portions, to transport you in place and time, Behind the Scenes.

The Dry vs. The Moist
by Sherre DeLys and Rick Moody
with musician Chris Abrahams
and sound engineer Russell Stapleton

A mix of fiction, fantasy and fact, The Dry vs. The Moist is a unique and intercontinental collaboration between three artists: the US writer Rick Moody, the Australian sound artist (and Radio Eye producer) Sherre DeLys, and pianist Chris Abrahams (The Necks). The resulting assemblage includes seven short stories ranging far and wide in both style and subject matter, but all the while revealing consistencies between between two different places (USA / Australia) and two very different environments (the desert/ the sea.)

The Dry vs. The Moist was commissioned by the ABC's Radio Eye on Radio National.

Who Is Vern Nash?
by Thelon Oeming and Steve Wadhams for the CBC's Outfront

The scale model of Olive Orange's kitchen in the fictional Chicago greystone. (photo by Joanna Ballinger - Click
to enlarge)

Cohabitation
by Jill Dorothy Summers
co-produced and engineered by David Whitcomb

Five dark and funny radio play inspired vignettes chronicling one day in the lives of the human and non-human (alive and dead) inhabitants of a fictional greystone in Chicago. Cohabitation is a sound piece, a book (with CD), a video, and a physical construction. We have the audio portion for you here, but to get the full experience see Cohabitation as part of the Albert P. Weisman Memorial Exhibition at Columbia College Hokin Gallery from January 23- February 24, 2006.

Due to popular demand, Jill just printed more copies of her (previously out of print) Cohabitation book and CD set. Click here for more info about how you can get one, or two, for your very own.

From Sagebrush to Steppe
by Hal Cannon and Taki Telonidis for the Western Folklife Center