Discover a World of Sounds 01 is the first show in a new series I’ll be doing to replace Mixtape Radio. This is yet another mix of offbeat storytelling, pop music, sound effects, and found audio. In returning to create these shows, I’ve begun to use analog tape recordings as source material. It plays a huge part of this first show including songs pulled from tape, reel-to-reel noise, and answering machine clips.
Last fall, I spent two days in Guerneville, a small town an hour outside of San Francisco known as a seasonal resort area for hedonistic gay men. Luckily, autumn was off-season and the only people around were locals… consisting mainly of grey haired hippie ladies and pockmarked meth addicts.
Guerneville sits right on the Russian River. It’s chock full of Northern California rural charm that includes looming red wood trees and a B&B on every corner. Main Street is all of two blocks packed full of antique boutiques, divey gay bars, and tackle/bait shops. Though it has the look and feel of a small conservative Norman Rockwell town, it’s actually a very liberal place with pot smoking skater punks and rusty Ford pickups sporting pro-choice bumper stickers. Also, those pick-up trucks are driven by Lesbians, lots of ‘em.
In the early 1980’s, Dolly Parton was a massive superstar speeding through the pop culture cosmos at a frantic pace. She became an actress, cut a number of award-winning albums, graced major magazine covers, and peddled her image on talk shows around the world. She made boob jokes all the rage and dominated the airwaves in multiple radio formats. Her talent was a force to be reckoned with.
“...You know, you... you make me feel so good inside. I always wanted a girl just like you… such a purity… Pretty Young Thing...”
It’s Christmastime in the city. You have just entered a downtown Old Navy clothing store where you are focused on buying only a new pair of cheap yet quality jeans and perhaps a nice dress shirt. Immediately upon entering you realize that Old Navy is a shopper’s cabaret complete with a full-functioning, three-dimensional musical number featuring helpful headset-wearing employees jumping in every direction to the rhythm of Michael Jackson’s “P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)”.
Buckle yourself down into the sleigh and whip out the eggnog…
It seems like at the beginning of the Christmas season each year more and more people are complaining, “Christmas just keeps creeping up earlier and earlier every year”. Of course they mean ‘creeping up’ in reference to a corporate push to drive consumers into stores all the sooner. I wondered if this was really true so I got an expert opinion on the matter from my grandmother. Apparently everything is just fine. She claims that the infiltration of Christmas is false and that people have been barking about it since Christmas’ conception.
