Phantom Power News | November 2025

In this month's cabinet of curiosities for the sonically obsessed, the director of a weird documentary about the weirdest town in Ohio talks experimental dialogue replacement. We also bid farewell to a BBC Radio legend, tune into the earth's low end with "macrophones," and listen to Irv Teibel's classic environments series in app form. All that, plus our usual list of sound-related conferences and calls for papers (for those most unredeemable of sound-o-philes).

|on the pod|

What just dropped, what's hanging in midair...

This month... Our pod-guests are Joel Stern and James Parker, two thirds of the art and research collective known as ⁠Machine Listening⁠. With their partner Sean Dockray, James and Joel have released a vinyl record called ⁠Environments 12: New Concepts in Acoustic Enrichment⁠. This album reimagines Irv Teibel’s 1970s environments albums—those relaxation records made for stressed-out people—as a set of soundscapes made for the stressed-out environment itself. (For more on environments, see this month's Phantom Artifact below.)

Next month... It's a roundtable on African music, digital audio technology, and the internet with three African music experts: Louise Meintjes, Reginold Royston, and Kingsley Okyere.

|the audit|

Featuring one sound-related work, with a focus on craft...

Catalina Jordan Alvarez: Sound Spring (2024). Mention Yellow Springs to any lefty native of the Buckeye State and you'll see a dreamy, faraway look spread over their face. This Southwest Ohio town of less than four thousand residents has a proudly multiracial and progressive history, as host to an abolitionist colony for formerly enslaved people, a civil rights hotbed, and an early LGBTQ stronghold. Famous residents include Tecumseh, Coretta Scott King, and Dave Chappelle. Yellow Springs is also a weird place, anchored by the leafy ghost town campus of struggling Antioch College and populated by (and I mean this as the highest compliment) a bunch of weirdos.

When I got to screen Catalina Jordan Alvarez's Sound Spring, I quickly sensed that the town had finally gotten the documentary it deserved—a film as weird, utopian and proudly experimental as Yellow Springs' residents. Visually, Alvarez makes the most of the deserted Antioch campus (where she taught while making the film), but the real innovation is in the sound design. From the opening scene, you feel that something is off. There's a disorienting discontinuity at work that takes a minute for you to put your finger on—something happening with the voices that adds a dreamlike quality to this exploration of the town's fascinating history and culture.

I asked Catalina to explain what she did with the soundtrack for Sound Spring, which is now available for educational purchase and community screenings through Grasshopper Film. Here's what she shared:

Hello Phantom Power newsletter readers. I'm Catalina Alvarez. The way I'm writing this piece for you now is by speaking aloud into my recorder, so you can hear my thought process. 

That's part of what I wanted to convey when I recorded the audio interviews for Sound Spring: I wanted to hear how people think, how they speak imperfectly, how they fumble over their words. And I wanted to match this natural, real, authentic audio with a performative visual layer, wherein the interviewees would re-perform what they had said, lip syncing or in some other way interacting with this audio interview. 

Hollywood films use a lot of ADR—and foley as well… so this combining of sounds and image in postproduction is actually very common. But in this case, I was inverting the order—sound recording came first and image later. And I knew that it would create an authentic-seeming performance if the audio was real, no matter how bad the acting was in the visual part. 

So exactly what did I do? After recording these audio interviews, I chose some of them that would actually become part of the film script. Then I created a script around them. Basically, each character was going to have their own vignette, but they would all be part of one feature film, portraying this village through the stories of a few residents.

And we might see the characters walking around town or, you know, going to have a coffee. And in between, they would tell a story, and then suddenly it would go on to the next interview, kind of like a city symphony, but with a lot of attention to a few particular residents and to stories, unlike the city symphonies that just portray everyone working and going to and fro from mornings till evening. 

So, see, I'm getting off track because I'm speaking rather than writing, and speaking is so incoherent. Because, you know, I'm not at a job interview. I didn't take notes. So I'm telling you things in the order that I remember them. 

And now I'm going to tell you that I created the script and then these interviewees were going to have to re-perform some of these lines, lip syncing them, which is actually extremely difficult, especially for someone who was not even necessarily a performer. 

So what did we do? For those performers who didn't have a lot of experience, we would loop one line over and over again in their earbuds, or a loudspeaker, and they would hear it, kind of like a song. 

So they would just jump into their own language. 

And I knew that this process was potentially going to be part of the film itself, showing how they would jump in and speak along with their previous recording, creating more layers of sound and storytelling.

Check out this scene:

As you can see here, Charles Arthur Williams (I call him Chuck), is breakdancing. Um, what we did is we had many rehearsals, and he found freezes where he would say his lines. 

And then you see Shane Creepingbear, he's DJing his own interview. 

And check out this scene:

So this is Rose Pelzl. She checks the village’s water meters. That's her job. So I had her do her job while roller skating—she's in the roller derby. 

And I had her interrupt her sentences, sometimes to perform a task, or I would break up her sentences when I made the excerpts for her to lip sync. 

This for me created poetry out of the interview material.

|speaker fodder|

I listen to things. Because, to quote my teenaged son, "Do you just want me to sit there in silence? Do you think I'm a psychopath?"

Melvyn Bragg: BBC Radio 4's In Our Times. My friend David McDonnell, a jazz saxophonist and electronic music prof at Temple University, is one of those people who can hold forth on any topic, no matter how arcane. How fitting then, that it was Dave who turned me on to the most erudite podcast in history. For over a quarter of a century--and more than 1,000 episodes--host Melvyn Bragg interviewed every type of academic you could possibly imagine. He was a strict taskmaster who demanded succinct and understandable explanations of the most complex matters, whether it was literary theory or particle physics. I've had literal nightmares about being invited on Bragg's show and being forced to represent sound studies in his studio!

Well, alas, I'll never get to find out if I was up to the challenge, because Bragg has decided to hang up his headphones. But if you want a sound education (or perhaps just the perfect sleep aid), the show goes on...

Brian House: Everyday Infrasound in an Uncertain World (Gruenrekorder, 2025). Past Phantom Power guest Brian House devises the most innovative methods for bringing the world's invisible and inaudible dimensions to life before our ears. Quotidian Record (2012) sonified a full year of his phone's location-tracking data and pressed it into vinyl. (Surprisingly, it was a jam.) Urban Intonation (2017) dropped ultrasonic microphones into NYC rat burrows and down-pitched the resulting recordings to let us hear how rats communicate with one another (give it a listen in this episode if you dare).

This month, Brian sent me his latest LP, which transforms the hugest of soundwaves into the audible cries and shudders of a planet in crisis. Recorded in Amherst, Massachusetts using self-built “macrophones”—large-scale microbarometers designed to detect infrasonic waves (below ~20 Hz)—House records the infrasound that constantly penetrates our bodies, often from hundreds or thousands of miles away.

On the record, Brian compresses 24 hours of atmospheric recording into two 12-minute tracks by speeding the material up by a factor of 60. What emerges is not music so much as a documentation of the rumblings of distant wildfires, receding glaciers, spinning turbines, and shifting ocean currents—now audible as gurgles, glissandos, and fleeting pings.

The project underscores House’s ongoing interest in the intersection of non-human systems, technology and aesthetics: by making us hear what we usually cannot, the album traces our entanglement with a climate-reshaping world and invites a reconsideration of listening as a political act. As of this writing, there are only 59 copies of the limited run vinyl left, so act fast.

|phantom artifact|

A tool of the sonic trades I use or merely lust after...

Environments app for iOS (Numero). Many readers will know that I have mixed feelings about "orphic media," the sonic technologies that help us concentrate or relax but also cut us off from the world. But beyond any ethical or philosophical concerns, most nature sound apps just kind of suck. The sound quality is often mid to bad. Or the loops are too short, which denatures the "nature" and amplifies the artifice, blowing the whole charade on both aesthetic and functional levels.

Basically, what I'm saying is, if you're going to pipe in a fake ocean, pipe in the original fake ocean. The one that was created with an analog tape loop and a room-sized IBM360 computer way back in the Age of Aquarius. Get the environments app.

Created by The Numero Group in collaboration with Irv Teibel’s daughter Jennifer, the app has a warm, soft-focus 60s/70s aura. It features 23 remastered analog recordings, Teibel's own photography, and an aesthetic that honors the original LPs.

Listen to it as a compelling intersection of archival aesthetics, playback ecology, and the commodification of ambient sound as lifestyle tool. Or just use it as Uncle Irv intended: for taking mental trips with your friends, making your plants grow faster, and "crashing and balling."

|oratorium|

Upcoming conferences and lectures in sound studies, acoustic ecology, audio engineering, (ethno)musicology podcasting, etc....

|vocatio|

You mean you do this shit for a living? Ok, here are a few upcoming calls for papers or other works...

|outro|

And that's it for this edition of Phantom Power. Let me know what you think and what you'd like to see going forward. Hit me up if you'd like me to consider your work for next month. And if you liked this newsletter, please forward it to a friend.

Our outro music this month is "Heaven is No Feeling" by Cate LeBon. I'll be talking to you in a couple of weeks on the pod and then I'm back in your email box in a month. Bye!