In 2023, I toured parts of the US, Canada and the UK with my podcast The Wind.
It’s twilight, lightly raining, and I dig through the bushes near camp. Tonight, a long forgotten logging road off a far-flung caol at the thumb joint of the Olympic Peninsula. I’ve managed to find another sweetly concealed place to sleep in my truck, and this one comes with breakfast — the entire forest is carpeted by salmon berries, flashing yellow and pink in my flashlight’s misty beam as I reach out and pop them into my mouth.
• | •
Two days before, I performed my podcast in Vancouver, British Columbia. The venue backed out with a week’s notice, and in DIY fashion we moved it to a city park. My podcast is called The Wind and I make it largely outdoors, so setting up under a tree in full summer bloom felt right at home. The ninth inning of a sandlot game unfolded nearby and as the sun descended behind the breweries in East Van, a small group assembled. Everybody sat in the cool grass and listened.
Talking with folks after the performance, it turned out almost all of them knew each other. Some went to the same workshop, adjacent plots in the same community garden. One of those friends was Mendel of the podcast Future Ecologies, who helped set up the night and who showed me how to identify salmon berries; the kind of lesson you seem to only get when visiting a new place with a passionate and curious friend. We sat on the rocks and watched the boats motor through the sound.
• | •
For years, I toured in DIY punk bands. Each of them tapped into existing networks of non-commercial live music communities and venues. This tradition traces back at least to the punk and hardcore bands of the 1980s, unable (or uninterested) to book shows in conventional venues, thumbing through address books and zines to call up punks in new towns to set up a stop on a ramshackle tour in an old van. Over the years myself and my bandmates booked tours all over the US, Canada, Mexico and South America by simply asking around and using bandcamp or social media to find artists in distant cities. And though the process is often grueling, it is also often also worth it, to find yourself in a stranger’s home in a far-off place, engaging with new folks through art, making the thing happen.
1: JT Green @ Sharp Ear, Soft Throat in New York City // 2. Ariana Martinez @ Sharp Ear, Soft Throat // 3. Jemma Rose Brown @ Sharp Ear, Soft Throat // 4. Delilah Sykes at Hyde Park Book Club in Leeds, UK // 5. Myself @ Sharp Ear, Soft Throat // 6. Radiophrenia studio performance Glasgow, Scotland
On a balmy August night in Echo Park, Los Angeles, a small crowd assembles in a warehouse overlooking downtown. Tonight is a mixed bill — myself, Sam Greenspan (Bellwether + TALKGROUP) performing a new narrative audio piece, synthesizer wizard Patterns and genre-bending musical act Howls Road. Just before my set, we’re unexpectedly joined by a Czech juggler who asks to do a set with midi-controller juggling balls.
In the past few years I’ve seen a handful of live podcasts in person and online, usually at theaters and larger event spaces. Ira Glass, Radiolab, 99% Invisible and several others have seemed to establish a sort of format for mixing narrative, music, chat and audio clips on stage to create produced shows that sound like the intricate audioscape of those podcasts, but with the added buzz of being in a room with other people. But the idea and logistics of booking a full theater sets the bar to entry high, especially for folks with smaller shows. It seems a good time to apply the ethics and mechanics of DIY touring to the nascent world of live podcasting.
Camp Spot, British Columbia // 2. Sam Greenspan Los Angeles, California // 3. Unusual Tuesdays LA, California // 4. All Around Cowboy Boise, Idaho // 5. Patterns LA, California // 6. The Wind LA, California // 7. Storai running the door LA, California
We don’t yet quite have the language for this kind of live production. For this rash of tours, I had a few possible live sets, each mixing live narration with audio clips, music and soundscape to create an audio-only presentation, solely for the folks in the room. As I booked the thing, folks seemed to expect that it would be a live taping, or a live-to-air interview with a guest, a chat show. Though “a reading”, or a “spoken word performance” seem to get closer to the format, I’m still searching for terminology that encapsulates the mix of soundscape and audio elements that accompany the spoken word. [Any ideas are appreciated in the comments section]
From New York City to Boise, Idaho to Glasgow, Scotland, I performed alongside a huge array of incredible artists working in audio. Poets, podcasters, narrative musicians and performances bordering on theater, an interactive video game; it seems to me that there is a bubbling soup of new live performances just beneath the surface. In this early format, there is no established form and every performance is an opportunity to engage and learn and express in a new way. I found myself deeply inspired by every single artist I performed with.
• | •
Up a couple flights of stairs and a maze of hallways, The Old Hairdresser’s is a storied venue for audio art and live music in Glasgow’s city center. For the last show of tour, the bill is stacked and most of the seats are filled. Joshua Tucci-Elza Breen opens the night with a melodic, lyric-driven looping set, then Cal Bannerman graces the stage with their mix of poetry and brilliantly performed narrative, a surrealist essay from a literary mag come to life. Then, Amber of Tin Can Audio assembles a workstation of samplers and mixers to perform a graceful meditation on the act of creation: the decision to climb an impossible tower, and the beauty that seems to flow from a difficult push into the unknown.
Touring this summer makes me think there is a ground swell of becoming in the world of live audio. I had the pleasure of meeting so many smart, inventive artists queering the idea of live performance, and though some infrastructure exists already for bigger podcasting shows, I think the time is right to start establishing our own small networks of bookstores and living rooms and quiet pubs. Stepping of the train in Leeds UK, driving away from the poetry open mic in Missoula, Montana, eating burritos at a share-house in a quiet neighborhood of London, sharing a beer in KQED’s event space overlooking San Francisco, I think about the way live performance can create and enliven community. An excuse to gather, and a way to inject new ideas, new feelings, new sounds. And we have all the tools to make it happen. ||
Have you been doing live audio performances lately? I’d love to hear about it. Reach out at fil@thewind.org or comment below.
THE WIND TOUR 2023:
May 23rd, 2023 - Reno, NV @ Downtown Reno Library, Story West (w/ Robin Mclean, Michael P. Branch, Ismay)
June 15th, 2023 - Garden City / Boise, ID @ Surel’s Place (w/ All Around Cowboy)
June 16th, 2023 - Enterprise, OR @ Bookloft
June 17th, 2023 - Moscow, ID @ Wild at Art (w/ Corey Oglesby)
June 18th, 2023 - Missoula, MT @ Imagine Nation Brewing (Worddog)
June 22nd, 2023 - Hamilton, MT @ Chapter One Bookstore
June 27th, 2023 - Vancouver, BC @ Woodlands Park (outdoor gathering)
July 1st, 2023 - Portland, OR @ Speck’s Records
July 20th, 2023 - San Francisco, CA @ KQED (PRX Podcast Garage)
August 10th, 2023 - Los Angeles, CA @ Suspirium (w/ Sam Greenspan/TALKGROUP, Howls Road, Pattern)
August 15th, 2023 - Los Angeles, CA @ Oracle Tavern for Unusual Tuesday
August 17th, 2023 - Boston, MA @ PRX Podcast Garage
August 18th, 2023 - New York City, NY @ UnionDocs for SHARP EAR, SOFT THROAT (w/ JT Green, Ariana Martinez, Jemma Rose Brown)
August 24th, 2023 - Leeds UK @ Hyde Park Book Club (w/ Delilah Sykes)
August 30th, 2023 - Glasgow, Scotland @ Center for Contemporary Arts / in studio performance for Radiophrenia
August 31st, 2023 - Glasgow, Scotland @ The Old Hairdresser’s (w/ Cal Bannerman, Tin Can Audio, Joshua Elza Breen-Tucci/The Neuroses)