Journalist Bella Bathurst describes how she lost her hearing while conducting interviews with the last generation of Scottish lighthouse keepers and then how it felt, twelve years later, to regain it. For this episode of The Organist, I edited, sound designed, mixed, and scored this interview between Bathurst and journalist Jason Boog. (Starts at 8:30)
Tag: The Organist
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Ravening for Delight
H. P. Lovecraft’s tales of cosmic horror have long inspired obsessive fandom. His short stories, in the hundred years since they were first published, have extended their tentacular influence to Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, the Alien movies, Dungeons & Dragons, and beyond. Paul La Farge’s new novel, The Night Ocean, traces Lovecraft’s unusual friendship with a 16-year-old fan named Robert Barlow. Lovecraft and Barlow collaborated on a story, also called “The Night Ocean,” that was the last work of fiction either of them wrote before Lovecraft’s death and Barlow’s own tragic end.
I interviewed La Farge by phone and produced a piece for The Organist. I also sound designed and mixed the rest of the episode.
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The Self-Rattling House
You’ve heard of a band playing a house party, but what if the band played the house itself? A new music venue in New Orleans called Music Box Village is investigating the acoustic possibilities of architecture. Rob Walker reported this story and I edited and produced it for The Organist (KCRW).
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How the Rorschach Got Its Blots
For The Organist (KCRW & McSweeney’s), I produced this story on the surprising backstory of the Rorschach test, that all-purpose metaphor we use for “means whatever you want it to mean.” As Damion Searls, the author of a new biography of Hermann Rorschach explains, that’s not what the test is really about at all. Check out the story in iTunes or at KCRW.
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The Music Collector
When a friend showed Nathan Salsburg some old records he had come across while clearing out an abandoned house, Salsburg at first wasn’t interested. He’s the curator for the Alan Lomax Archive, so he knows most old records are junk. But when he saw a rare 78-rpm Mississippi John Hurt, he knew his friend was onto something. That discovery led to a late-night Dumpster-dive and days spent rescuing fragile 78s from the collection of an enigmatic hoarder. I produced this story for The Organist, the podcast from KCRW and The Believer.