I thought about starting a podcast, and I know that dialogue is overdone these days but nonetheless I still had to go through the motions of trying something out.
Because I realized I had to make a podcast. It’s the most logical thing I can do, building on my work to post music online every week for the past year.
So here is my pilot episode. Please wear your headphones and sit in a comfortable chair or lie down on the floor.
Enjoy and reply back or comment to let me know how you like it? Should I continue or stop?
Four Track Snack Pack
There is a documentary making the rounds called Sisters with Transistors. I haven’t seen it yet, but I thought it would be a nice time to celebrate various women who have contributed to the electronic music canon over the decades. There are some amazing stories inside these pieces, such as Pauline Anna Strom making music as a blind woman with a long lapse where that music was largely unnoticed, to Laurie Spiegal making The Expanding Universe at Bell Labs on the first computers that could generate music using punchcards.
I am grateful for the time I got to participate in a Deep Listening workshop with Pauline Oliveros at the Wychwood Barns with NAISA many years ago. Her partner Ione did a session with us asking us to take note of the sounds we hear in our dreams. So next time you sleep, start to notice the sounds you hear in these dreams. Write them down and reflect on them. I’ve heard music in my dreams that I only wish I could have recorded. Maybe it made its way into my songs?
One year I saw Laurel Halo as she was first emerging into the larger music world at Mutek in Montreal. I was floored by this array of synths and guitar pedals she used to create this raw set of firey music. I picked one of her more recent, chilled out excursions though.
Enjoy the playlist.
Morning Splendor - Pauline Anna Strom
Appalachian Groove I - Laurie Spiegal
Raw Silk Uncut Wood - Laurel Halo
The Last Time - Pauline Oliveros
Or listen on YouTube.
Boy I have to really say thank you to everyone. A recent New York Times article describes our current condition by using the word languishing, a sort of in-between state that is not very flattering.
We’re waiting for help but it’s so slow to arrive. I don’t want to push these feelings away. I admit that some days I am more useless than a bag of brown rice. But thank you for hanging in there as long as you have, and I hope you can continue to pick yourself up every day and get the fresh air or read a great book or enjoy time with your family.
Making these experiments here has helped create meaning in my year so far, my personal pandemic relief, so that’s why I want to say thank you.
Love,
Elliott “Onion Bagel” Fienberg
Nothing More to Add...
"Sometimes we have to make a mess of it for it to all make sense..." - you probably cannot even imagine how much of my work and sometimes whole days get by and are culminating with a description very, very close to this :)
Keep "messing" it, and thank you for helping us get through these strange times!