Listen: "Words and Silences" on Phantom Power Podcast

A meditation on Thomas Merton's words and voice.

I’ve produced a new podcast that explores my work with the Thomas Merton hermitage tapes. I made it in conjunction with Mack Hagood at Phantom Power, an excellent podcast about sound, listening, media, and sound studies. You can listen to it here:

In this podcast, I share Merton’s words in his own voice. You can hear his curiosity and openness as he experiments with a new tape recorder. I focus in on a few key themes: playful perplexity, and uncertain self, what the tape reveals to us (and to Merton), and how Merton listens to himself on the tape recorder.

I also talk about my personal experiences in making the album Words and Silences. I visit Kentucky in search of recordings, to Vermont and Tennessee to work in solitude, and finally to my native Ohio to put everything together. All along, I am thinking about Merton, but I am also exploring what it means to listen, to make a project like this, to be vulnerable to others, to experience the suffering of the pandemic and social struggles, to be human.

Here are some photos from Kentucky, Vermont, Tennessee, and Ohio, all while I was working on the project:

From top left to right: listening to Merton tapes at the Merton Center in Louisville, Kentucky (2017); my “hermitage” at the Marble House Project artist residency in Dorset, Vermont (2019); at the Loghaven residency in Knoxville, Tennessee (2019); my garage workspace in Columbus, Ohio, where I finished the album (2020); and with the Words and Silences band and Brother Paul Quenon at Merton’s hermitage in Trappist, Kentucky (2022).

After my narrative piece, Mack and I talk together about Words and Silences. He asks about my process and how it parallels Merton’s, about the ways I work with material and musicians, and about both “archival performances” and archival stewardship.

I hope you can take the time to listen — I love bringing the Merton tapes to the fore, to let them speak for themselves. I also enjoy hearing the “grain” of Merton’s voice, and how it reveals many layers of information.

You can listen to this podcast on any of your favorite podcast players. You can also play it and read the transcript at the Phantom Power website here: