Phantom Power News | October

This is the inaugural drop of the Phantom Power Newsletter, a cabinet of curiosities for the sonically obsessed, stocked by your apron-attired floor manager, Mack Hagood.

Each month I'll bring you an assortment of thoughts, readings, listenings, news, tools, and events that I couldn't stuff into Phantom Power, my podcast about sound studies, the sonic arts, acoustic ecology, and other things of an aural nature. Please let me know what you'd like to read in this space and submit your news and new releases for possible inclusion!

This issue, we've got an outstanding audio story about men who love songbirds to death, a hand-cranked tape machine that's got me all wound up, new music releases from friends of the pod, a moment of Zen from Studio Ghibli, and--for the hardcore nerds--big lists of sonic talks, conferences, and calls for papers.

Let's go!

|on the pod|

This month... Our pod-guest is sound designer, film director, and video game writer Graham Reznick, with whom I had a very Halloween-appropriate conversation about horror sound design, haunted media, sensory deprivation tanks, and fairy circles.

Next month... It's a conversation with Machine Listening, an innovative sound art and theory collective who just dropped Environments 12, a vinyl release that takes Irv Teibel's relaxation records into a speculative AI future. We go deep on some weird shit too!

|the audit|

In this space, I'll share a new work of scholarship or art that turns an expert ear onto the world. Today's pick is anthropologist Nils Bubandt and musicologist Sanne Krogh Groth's study of "the Asian songbird crisis," "Love unto death: The multispecies aesthetics of birdsong and bird extinction in Indonesia."

In my own travels in East and Southeast Asia, I often encountered huge urban songbird markets where men sold, traded, and trained thousands of colorful birds in lacquered bamboo cages. I was charmed by these spaces but little understood them. In this accessible and compelling 18 minutes of audio-based public scholarship (expertly edited and mastered by Tesla Manaf), Bubandt and Groth shed light on what these markets are all about, at least in the Indonesian context. As the abstract explains:

In villages and cities across the Indonesian island of Java, hundreds of songbird competitions are held every week. In these competitions, members of one species of songbird compete with each other, where the aesthetic qualities of the song, including its rhythm, melody, timbre, and volume, are evaluated by a team of referees. First prizes are large cash awards and sometimes cars.  A birdsong that incorporates motifs from other species is especially valued, and bird owners spend much time caringly teaching their birds the song of other species. Champion birds are traded for as much as 100,000 euros.

Sadly, this "songbird craze" has had catastrophic consequences for native songbird populations. Bubandt and Groth note how western journalists and environmentalists have exhibited futile moral outrage over the impending extinction rather than trying to understand the cultural and interspecies dynamics that power the craze: "We ask, what do these bird lovers appreciate and love about their captive birds? What do they hear in the song of their birds? With an answer to these questions, we might have a better chance of averting the extinction of dozens of endemic species." The authors let us hear these wildly noisy competitions, as well as the voices of the men who participate in them, men who literally love these birds to death.

The audio article is featured in Denmark's Seismograf, possibly the most exciting an innovative journal/magazine going right now. It was featured in the September issue Sound and the More-Than-Human Worlds, which includes 19 audio papers. If you're a Phantom Power listener and you haven't heard of Seismograf, I give you a money-back guarantee you will love it.

|speaker fodder|

Today we've got two new releases from Pals o' the Pod, one on CD and one on the radio--old style!

My neighbor and Miami University colleague Per Bloland just dropped Shadows of the Electric Moon, his new CD featuring Unheard-of//Ensemble, Wild Rumpus, pianist Keith Kirchoff, percussionist Bill Solomon, and cellist Stephen Marotto. Per is an acclaimed composer of electroacoustic music, who has released work on the Tzadik label and done multiple residencies at IRCAM. A lot of his recent work involves putting resonators on acoustic instruments like pianos, cellos, and drums--with often unearthly results. I particularly dig the title track, especially while viewing the score in real time:

Recent guest and Harvard composer Yvette Jackson just premiered her new Deutschlandfunk-commissioned radio opera, Entf. (Backspace), which she discussed on the podcast. It's mostly in German but you don't need a passport to embark on this innovative audio odyssey.

|phantom artifact|

In this space, I will discuss a tool of the sonic trades I am either using or lusting after. In this case, it's the latter. In my recent conversation with sound designer Graham Reznick, he told me about the HC-TT, or Human-Controlled Tape Transport. This hand-cranked tape recorder by Brooklyn's Landscape allowed Graham to make the uncannily zippy fairy sounds that populate his soundtrack for the film Rabbit Trap. Instead of a motor, your fingers spin the knobs that move the tape, creating warped, sludgy, and tactile sounds. A touch-switch lets you instantly mute the output, and the metallic pads invite strange feedback loops.

Y'all, this thing is pretty sick. Look at this short of someone scratching a Perry Como tape on it.

|oratorium|

Here are some upcoming conferences and lectures in the worlds of sound studies, acoustic ecology, audio engineering, (ethno)musicology podcasting, etc....

|vocatio|

For the serious nerds, here are a few upcoming calls for papers or other works...

|outro|

And that's it for this episo... er, 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 mention something next month. And if you liked this newsletter, please forward it to a friend.

Our outro music this month is this Studio Ghibli nature mix. 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!