The Glam Rock Experience

This podcast explores the 'Glam Rock' of the 1970s. I introduce the listener to a concert space and interview some pretend fans to introspect why they may be interested in listening or going to Glam Rock concerts. The podcast takes the listener back in time to see where and how this genre was born. Interviews of David Bowie and other artists come in and out with interwoven music to create a discourse about the significance of glam rock in popular music culture. I also talk about the superficial presentations that these musicians would perform when going on stage. There is a relationship between technology and identity construction from the glam rock genre, which created a subculture of followers and fans alike. I also changed the voice pitch of my recorded material, to create an androgynous effect. The Glam Rock genre in many ways glamorized stardom, fame, and art through the music vehicle. Musicians and performers were able to explore their identities as men dressing as women or wearing makeup, to exaggerate female characteristics and question gender differences. When listening to this podcast, it's important to imagine yourself as a listener and participant in a live concert space, where you can envision a scene of over-the-top rock music theatre, where the costumes are just important as the music. With that said, Glam Rock was a transformative period that went to create an excessive experience of sight and sound. Disclaimer note: original interview and music audio material were from Youtube, and the rest were from personal recordings.

The Glam Rock Experience

M.W. Burns: a new approach to “everyday” sonic warfare

M.W. Burns uses everyday sounds in unsuspecting places at randomtimes to surprise and startle listeners. By using elements of fear, surpriseand spatial encasement, Burns draws inspiration from sonic warfare in hispieces. Although his work and sonic warfare are in fact very different, bothsounds have very similar ideas, and one may even consider Burns’ work to besonic warfare in everyday life. This podcast explores these ideas byillustrating the comparisons in their applications and meanings. The soniclandscapes portrayed bring attention to the similarities, allowing listeners togain a better understanding of Burns’ work and how it may be influenced by theidea of sonic warfare.

M.W. Burns: A new approach to everyday sonic warfare

Going Back to Push Forward - Hip Hop Tape Culture

We move very fast in the digital age, there is something to be said about slowing back down again. With the cassette tape, fans of music of all types can sacrifice the immediate convenience of digital music for the analogue alternative, which lets you learn something about yourself in the process. It allows you to listen carefully and wholly to a track or album considering the inconvenience of doing otherwise, it gives back the sensual aspects of music often lost, such as touching, feeling, smelling, and physically sharing a song/album, and gives you a deliciously low-fi tone to boot. Young hip hop beat makers have been turning to tapes as their mediums for production in recent history, revealing a new form of the genre, and a new form of ourselves in the process.

Going Back to Push Forward - Hip Hop Tape Culture

Lyrics for Social Change

My final podcast talks about Michael Franti and other artists who use there lyrics for a better purpose. This purpose is to conduct social change. The Bioneers movement is explained thoroughly in this recording. It is a non-profit organization who are interested in keeping the web of life for future generations. My podcast also talks about technologies that these artists use to help persuade others to help the world. Artists are becoming more and more involved in changing the world to be a better place. This podcast goes deeper into examples of artists that are contributing to making the world a better place.

Lyrics for Social Change

Global Beats: World Fusion Illusion

What is “World fusion” music? "Global Beats: World Fusion Illusion" sets out to explore the topic, focusing on the various approaches to creating music within this genre and the potential outcomes of musical globalization. Tied in with this theme of a global musical culture are the inherent issues of access, origin, production, and dissemination. How do these variables affect the mental construction of other cultures in the minds of consumers? This podcast invites listeners into a rich sonic landscape of worldbeat samples, with hopes of shedding some light on a widely misunderstood genre.

Global Beats: World Fusion Illusion

Sonorous Fractals

This episode of Sonorous Fractals investigates the relationship between listening and argumentation. This podcast pivots around the question: can listening be an argument? Attempting to answer this question leads Justin, our host, into the archives. Sifting through ancient texts and interviewing experts in the field, Justin is able to discern how listening has come to be understood as a passive sense. However, simply foregrounding our problematic relationship to listening is insufficient. Utilizing the work of avant-garde artists like Pierre Schaeffer, John Cage, Paul D. Miller, and Girl Talk, Justin traces the emancipatory potentiality of using listening as a mode of invention. He argues that listening to the ordinary sounds of the everyday provides artists with an index of possible tropes that tap directly into social memory. In other words, it affords artists the ability to resonate with their audience, persuading them into different states of being. Our handsome host concludes by noting that listening is a mode of argumentative invention because it provides arguers a reservoir of relevant sounds to guide the assembly of a piece.

Sonorous Fractals: The Podcast

emotional complexities and atomic cyborgs

"In the near future, nuclear energy [will] create a world 'in which…routine household tasks are just a molter of pushing a few buttons…where the air is everywhere as fresh as on a mountain top and the breeze from a factory as sweet as from a rose…Imagine the world of the future…the world that nuclear energy can create for us."

"technology was becoming out of control, that humans were becoming machines themselves, that people were losing their ties to nature."

In Lunar Rhapsody, from the album Music Out of the Moon, we start with a musical segment that mixes human voice with the technological theremin, capturing a mood that is full of both love and union as well as loss and sadness. In the era of this piece, society was indeed merging with technology, embodied here in the subtle mixture of theremin voice and human song. People were being taught to love the atom, and its utopian possibilities, as well as merging their homes and spaces with technological complexity. Yet at the same time people were learning to cope with the loss of a simpler world and a simpler time. The first atom bombs had been dropped only two years previous, and technological complexity had crossed a threshold where its implications (threatening and enlightening) pervaded everyday life.
In this piece, whenever the theremin comes in, we enter into these subtle emotional mixtures of both loss and love. The ambiguity of these emotional states captures the true emotional tones of the time, rather than a binary emotional tone that is either exotic and exciting or scary and dangerous.
Humans were merging their domestic spaces with these new elements; technological complexity and atomic and cold war fears. Musically, it becomes unclear where exactly the theremin plays and where the human voice plays, mirroring the difficulty in defining the borders of new technologies in the everyday life and homes spaces. This ambivalence is slightly haunting, and the musical tones of Lunar Rhapsody captures this feeling.
Towards the end, when the theremin pulls out completely, and we are left with humans singing and classical interments, we enter into and conclusion full of excitement and adventure. The merging of technos and human has become one, and the only way to escape the strangeness of these changes in the daily life spaces is to blast off into the cosmos. We end with adventure and suspense, as the unified cyborgian populous leaves the home for new frontiers of outer space, rocket ships, and alien colonies.