In the most recent season premiere of HBO’s omnivorous Girls, there is a moment where Hannah balls up on a forest floor, plugs in earbuds to iPhone and the distinctive, nasal voice of This American Life host Ira Glass talks to her. As with so many of the cultural signifiers peppered throughout Lena Dunham’s series, this moment is made to say: “Hey, I’m in on the secret too”.
This American Life may have been blossoming for well over a decade now, but its international popularity and the influence of its fusion of intimate storytelling with a documentary approach on a new generation of radiomakers has germinated a golden age for podcasting. The American public radio system has always encouraged a more free-form, independent, off- kilter approach, and this spirit runs deep through the plethora of shows now popular far beyond the 50 states. Shows like the hyperactive Radiolab, the lascivious Love + Money and the venturesome Theory of Everything hinge on complex, left-field journalism, distinctive hosting and produc- tion at a sometimes microtonally complex level, granting the radio producer a long- deserved place in the pantheon of auteurs.
Podcast listening connotes isolation. Two white earbuds shield the listener from the aural obtrusions of the world around her – the phlegmy coughs of fellow commuters, the royalty-free pop covers tannoyed across Tesco, the screeching housemate riding in the room next door – and establishes a new, intimate plane between her and the soto voce in her ear. Moreso than with live radio, that misty jungle of voices, jingles, crosstalk and clockwatching, the podcast emphasizes order, a comforting linearity. The listener trusts the keys to the presenter, and the mystery bus tour begins.
Broadcasting, conversely, is determined by a communal accessibility. Think of those hammy wartime images of British families huddled, ears extruding, about the wireless as the BBC World Service reports from the Front. Sounds Alive, running in the Freemason’s Hall this September, seeks to bring these two separate listening experiences, the personal and the communal, back into sweet harmony.
Arriving off the back of a series of cosy and convivial group listening evenings curated by (erstwhile Totally Dublin columnist) Julien Clancy, Sounds Alive will host experiential shows from two of the podcasting world’s blockbusters, The Moth and 99% Invisible. We had the pleasure of initiation from these cult radio grandmasters.
ROMAN MARS – 99% INVISIBLE:
His show may only be four years old, but Roman Mars is the bedtime soundtrack for pretty much anybody with an interest in design the world over. 99% Invisible gives heroic character to the genius of design and architecture hidden in plainsight and demystifies the world of manmade objects with an ingenue’s charm.
Mars recently set up Radiotopia, a network that gathers up some of the most progressive podcasts and radio shows in town and, just like his Kickstarter-smashing podcast, it’s already a raging success.
Do you have any memory that stands out as the point you got interested in the medium of radio?
For me, I was always really fascinated by sound. I used to tape-record movies on to audio tapes. Like, I would rent VHS cassettes from the video store and selectively take all the dialogue parts out and make a mash-up of them all. To this day I still like really talk-y movies, I’m not all that visually oriented.
I fell in love with public radio in particular in my late teens, I just loved the way presenters talked. There’s this standard-enough daily talk show called Talk of the Nation, which was hosted by this fella named Ray Suarez. Talk show anchoring is a hard job, you have to be like the traffic cop for all the people calling in, really pull the best part of what a caller is trying to say out of them. They did this one episode in the late 90s, during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and the question for the show was: “If the president can’t be your hero, then who is?”. And so this one guy called in about the middle of the hour and said “You know what, Ray Suarez? You are my hero.” And I thought “Holy shit! Ray Suarez is my hero too. I wanna do anything to work with Ray Suarez”. I didn’t know what that would entail, but it became my mission. I knew somebody had to read the books for him, write the questions and that’s when I began to re-arrange my life to work in radio in some way.
So what does the 99% Invisible live experience entail? This is going to be your first run-out, right?
It’s the first one on another continent, anyway. I don’t do a ton of public shows. I do things like show up at Nike Headquarters or whatever stuff like that that comes up that helps me pay the bills. So I host part-live. I have music to talk over and clips to trigger of other sources doing the talking. I string together a bunch of stories from the show thematically and add in some new pieces. I have pictures for visual gags too, which is a luxury. The live show is a simulacrum of what I actually do every day, i.e. I don’t just hit a button and sit there watching it all happen on Pro Tools.
The Radiolab and This American Life live shows are quite expansive and quite weird. I guess because of the renaissance in storytelling radio that this whole new thing has opened up in terms of live experience. It must be cool to have no real set rules for this kind of thing?
The important thing is you want to make sure there’s a good reason why you’re doing it in front of people. I fig- ured out this low impact, one-person way of doing it. If I had my brothers though, I would do something that was made exclusively for stage like Jad [Abumrad, Radiolab]. And you know, Ira Glass [This American Life] has his dance thing that’s barely radio at all. It’s a fun territory, it reminds me of the age when intellectuals would go do these public lectures with a five mile scrolling map of the Mississippi and tell the story of traveling down the river.
How is the whole Radiotopia enterprise going?
It’s going well. The work has been really good, and everybody’s a bit more financially stabilized. Everyone’d download numbers have gone through the roof – Benjamen Walker’s have shot up 375% or something like that. 99% Invisible did almost 2 million down- loads in May, if we’re getting word out to listen to the other shows than that’s exactly what we want to be doing. We did our first theme week recently, The Long Shadow, and we hope to fundraise together in the fall. It’ll be the biggest test, if we can raise more together than we would individually.
And how are you finding the new weekly format for 99% Invisible?
Because of the last Kickstarter I have Sam Greenspan, Avery Truffelman and Katie Mingle on the team now, and they’re doing incredibly good jobs. We’re getting into the groove of it, though it’s tough. We don’t have a lot of wiggle room. The only thing that throws me off is that knowing I have trips like this one to Dublin com- ing up and I’m like “how are we going to do the show, why did we agree to this?!”. It’s totally doable. I like the rhythm of it. The thing about doing an ongoing series is that you’re always crafting what the thesis of the show is in an overall sense. We’re constantly readjusting the thesis of what we think design means as a whole in the world. I like that constant appraisal.
It’s cool that 99% Invisible always manages to find beauty in the mundane, but there has to be some piece of architecture or design that you just know you’ll never love.
The ones that I really shy away from are the new, fancy things that everybody does, you know, the kind of thing that you’ll see on the cover of a design magazine. I remember I was at a conference the day after Steve Jobs died and a guy said to me: you’re a design show, what are you going to do about Steve Jobs. I replied “Man, I am never going to do a show about Steve Jobs.” There is not another word that needs to be written on that subject.
I love how Apple made design awareness more prominent in people’s lives and I appreciate that iPhones are the reason our show exists, that they’re the reason the word “podcast” exists, even, but I would never do a piece about that. The new and interesting and the beau- tiful and the shiny, that’s the kind of stuff I don’t truck with.
If you haven’t listened yet, you can find more of Roman Mars, Sam Greenspan, Avery Truffelman and Katie Mingle at: 99percentinvisible.org and radiotopia.fm
CATHERINE BURNS – THE MOTH
In an age defined by fragmentation and specialisation The Moth’s concept couldn’t be more simple: here is the stage, here is a mic, tell us a story about yourself. There is some magic in the vulnerable, revelatory moments that the show is rich with, something special in its combination of ancient storytelling forms with the 21st century confessional.
Its popularity has been augmented by the release of a book collection of some of its strongest stories and its atmospheric live events. Its artistic director, Catherine Burns, returns for the second time this year, stories in tow.
I think that the way we tell stories is very much an inheritance. Who was the great storyteller in your own life growing up?
I’m from the South, from Alabama, so I grew up with the culture of families sitting around telling stories. So I would listen to all these stories passed down from my ancestors. My grandmother would tell me these detailed stories about my fifth-great-grandfather and what he did in the American Revolution, or the story about my great- great-grandfather being kidnapped by the Yankees in the Civil War. So there was a strong storytelling tradition, especially amongst the women in my family.
I think that a good storyteller is one who can fashion something memorable out of of the tiniest, most mundane incident.
Definitely, we use the word ‘raconteurs’ a lot to describe people in our community, people who can make a story about running out to buy milk in hilarious detail. But there are also people who aren’t the life of the party who have a story to tell but have to find their voice. We also celebrate those people at The Moth, people who haven’t been on stage since their high school graduation but have had something extraordinary happen to them – those are the people we have to go and find, and encourage to get up there. I think it’s the combination of both of these kinds of people that make The Moth what it is.
The last time The Moth visited was more of a listening party than a live show. Can you tell us a little bit about the Story Slam nights, how they’re structured and so on?
So yeah, our show in Dublin will be twofold. The first part is our Mainstage series, which is where we go out and cast and then direct the storytellers. The storytellers will be mostly cast locally. Then the Story Slams are our open mic series where we set a theme and essentially pull names from a hat, and storytellers get a five minute slot. You never know what you’re going to get, of course, but they’re so popular over here. In New York City, there might be a night where the first person is a student, the second is a firefighter who’s saved a kid from a burning building and the third might be Neil Gaiman. It levels the playing field, makes it about the community and not what your resumé is. We like to have a tapestry of voices.
Do you find with more confessional stories there’s a rawness, that there’s some emotional processing that needs to be done before it can be told? When you tell a story you need to be outside of it, right?
We try to find people who have already processed the emotions. We never want it to feel like therapy for either the teller or the audience, and there are times when we get on the phone with people and we can tell that they’re not stable enough to tell it yet. We used to have a rule of thumb: it’s five years after a divorce, ten years after a death. We find that some people, though, are exceptions. We once had the comedian, Tig Notaro, walk up on stage and say “I was just diagnosed with breast cancer this morning”, and she was brilliant about it. One of the things I like to say is that you should tell stories from your scars, and not from your wounds. You want to be able to relay events in a way that’s meaningful to the audience.
Do you cry at any Moth stories or have you built up a thicker skin by now?
Oh my god, no, I haven’t. The day I stop crying at Moth stories is the day they put me out to pasture. I cry again and again. I was retold a story for the fourth time today in rehearsal. I knew what was coming, but I still cried. I cried more because I knew it was coming.
The Titanic effect.
Exactly. If I ever stop laughing or crying, then it’s time to take a vacation.
What’s been in your own ears lately?
There’s this really sweet show called Radio Diaries, which a guy named Joe Richman runs. He’s known for sending teenagers out with recording devices to do diaries of their adolescence and has them come back years later. A little nepotism: our former creative director Lea Thau, who’s Danish, has this show called Strangers. Krista Tippett’s On Being is an interview show with scien- tists and people with a spiritual bent to their work, but the stories she pulls out of them and the philosophical issues she covers means those are the defin- ing interviews of any of the personali- ties she has. She breaks my heart open every week.
Weep along at themoth.org
Sounds Alive takes places on the 5th and 6th September at the Freemason’s Lodge, Dublin 2. Tickets and a full program are available at soundsalive.ie
