To celebrate the publication of my book Noisy Memory: Recording Sound, Performing Archives (on August 26 with the University of North Carolina Press), I decided to make a 5-part podcast that explores many of the themes and sounds from the book. I’ll release an episode each week, roughly corresponding to the different archives that I have worked with over the past two decades.
You can listen to each episode here on Substack first, and then I’ll be releasing them on all of the other podcast services, too.
In this first episode—”Learning to Listen”—I travel to Berea, Kentucky, where I first worked with archival materials. Slowly, I learned how to listen to archives, and discovered their “noisy memories”—all the extra sounds that can reveal new ways of understanding the past. We’ll listen to several excerpts of the music that particularly moved me.
And then, we’ll explore two albums of new music that I made, which came out of my time at Berea: American Winter (originally released on Atavistic Records in 2007) and Rawhead and Bloodybones (released on Dust to Digital Records in 2015).
It’s important to note that I couldn’t possibly add in all of the stories and music that are in the book. There is so much more that I couldn’t cover here. So, if this material intrigues you, please pre-order a copy of the book here!
And, if you’d like to listen and/or purchase to these albums (without my commentary), you can do so here.
And finally: want to learn more about this Noisy Memory project? You can check out a media companion to the book here, which shares descriptions, videos, recordings, and scores of the music from each chapter of the book.
Thank you for listening —
Brian
