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Olivia Rosenman

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These are the best podcasts/bits of audio I've listened to this month...

July 2020

July is Audiocraft month in Australia. This year the festival went online and it was the next best thing. My first recommendation for this month came by way of of an Audiocraft session, which were extremely well programmed this year by the inimitable Jess O’Callaghan.

I also presented at the Audiocraft festival. See more about my session Mic on Nature here.

Widows of Shuhada – RNZ

“Four women whose husbands were made martyrs (shuhada) – in the Christchurch mosque attacks of March 15, 2019, have allowed us into their lives as they come to terms with their new reality – Widows of Shuhada.” This is an intense series on many levels. The stories of these woman who lost their husbands in a brutal attack are gut-wrenchingly sad. One woman was four months pregnant when her husband died, and is now caring for an infant alone. Another was present at the mosque that day and witnessed the terror and violence. All the women speak eloquently and share their stories with generosity and honesty.

As a non-religious person, I find the careful explanations of Muslim ideas and practises interesting and, at times, confronting. I find it hard to get my head around the idea that the men who were killed were chosen by Allah, and being chosen in this way is an honour….

The production team behind this series presented at Audiocraft and it was one of my favourite sessions, along with a fellow RNZ presentation – that of the team behind White Silence (which if you haven’t listened to, you should). It was so refreshing to hear non-American perspectives on storytelling and audio.

The Skewer – BBC Radio 4

The series description: “a dizzying, dazzling satirical river of sound”, is entirely accurate. Listening to The Skewer feels like floating downstream, bouncing between dreamlike memories of events and ideas of 2019 and 2020.

This is the first of six episodes (each is in two parts for no apparent reason).

Intrigue: Tunnel 29 – BBC Radio 4

Two BBC Radio 4 recommendations in one month – they do what they do very well.

This series – part of the Intrigue feed that includes The Ratline, another acclaimed series to which I am yet to listen – tells the story of a tunnel from east to west Berlin, and the 29 people who escaped through it in 1962. It’s a remarkable story, expertly told by Helena Merriman. Each episode ends on a cliff-hanger which is slightly irritating but extremely successful in encouraging you to listen to them in quick succession.

I’ve included the trailer audio here.

The Brain on Nature team presented the first session of the Audiocraft podcast festival – Mic on Nature. Read more about it here.

June 2020

Deep Breaths: How Breathing Affects Sleep, Anxiety & Resilience – Fresh Air

A typically excellent Terry Gross interview with journalist James Nestor, author of ‘Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art.’ Chances are you’ve been paying a lot more attention to your respiratory system of late, but this will make you think about it in a new and exciting way. Humans take about 25,000 breaths per day, giving it little thought, but how and where you breathe can have a big impact on your health.

There’s also a great review of a new album of Transylvanian folk songs.

Fighting a Virtual Pandemic – Imaginary Worlds

Let’s be honest, it feels like we’re living in some sort of dystopia right now. A setting for a sci-fi or spooky video game. As it turns out, a very similar situation was played out World of Warcraft (a multiplayer online game). In 2005, the game was taken over by a virus called Corrupted Blood, and people behaved a lot like we’re seeing in the real life version right now. . I talk with epidemiologist and gamer Eric Lofgren, NYU game design instructor Alexander King and longtime player Virginia Wilkerson about the parallels between the pandemic in World of Warcraft the one we’re facing in the real world, and what lessons we can learn by studying how players reacted to a virtual virus.

The Question of Black Identity – Historically Black

This episode is from 2016 but I found it on a list of recommendations being shared around all the Black Lives Matter protests that were taking place in June. It’s hosted by Roxane Gay who is excellent at it. It’s about just how complex racial identity in the U.S. because, in Gay’s wise words: “race is an invented category rooted in slavery”. In this episode we hear the voices of four people who, at one time or another, have had to answer the question: “What are you?”

A nice walk I took in June

May 2020

Times of Cloud – The Paris Review Podcast

This is the first episode of the Paris Review podcast and to be honest I would recommend listening to all of them. The podcast brings together readings of poetry and prose and tape (sometimes reenactments) of interviews from the Review’s enviable archive.

This episode features a delightful interview with Maya Angelou interviewed by George Plimpton, who opens with: You once told me that you write lying on a made-up bed with a bottle of sherry, a dictionary, Roget’s Thesaurus, yellow pads, an ashtray, and a Bible. What’s the function of the Bible?

And Wallace Shawn reading “Car-Crash while Hitchhiking”, a mind-bending story by Denis Johnson.

Bonsai – Ochenta Stories

This podcast is from Studio Ochenta, a Paris-based outfit that specialises in multi-lingual storytelling. Ochenta Stories is a series of short fiction stories/mini-docs/audio art from quarantine. (Yes more multilingual podcasts please!)

This episode, presented first in Italian and then in English, is about one mans’s troubled relationship with his bonsai plant. I speak a bit of Italian but not enough to understand the story in Italian. Nevertheless, as with all episodes from this show, I find it really enjoyable to listen to languages other than my native tongue.

Punk in a Pandemic – Mike Williams and Friends

Mike Williams, ace storyteller and all round great guy, has embarked on an ambitious indie endeavour to publish three episodes a week of this new show. Each episode features a phonecall with a random Facebook friend. I have my suspicions about just how randomly they are selected.

Punk in a Pandemic tells the hilarious story of ‘Fucking Carnage’, a punk band started in a Toronto sharehouse in the height of Covid lockdown.

A wine night with friends in May – covid style!

April 2020

You may have noticed a bit of a gap between entries here. Sorry. The end of 2019 and beginning of 2020 was a crazy time. Not only was Australia burning down, and the world facing off a pandemic, but also I had a baby. And in the weeks before she arrived, I made two episodes of History Lab and a documentary for ABC Radio National. So yes, there was a lot going on.

In some ways, I’d recommend having a tiny baby in lockdown. A mini smiling face and gorgeous gurgling noises are a welcome distraction from the news. And ultimately it’s not that different to normal life with an infant: lots of time at home, and going out requires both a good reason and a lot of preparation.

But in other ways it is tragic. My daughter is missing out on cuddles from her grandparents and extended family and I am devastated that I can’t share the amazing development of the first months of her life.

Anyway, enough prevaricating. The one good thing about lockdown is it’s given me a bit more time between nappies and boobs to listen to podcasts. Here are April’s recommendations.

The NHS Symphony – BBC Between the Ears

I discovered Between the Ears in my podscriptions but have no memory of subscribing. This episode sits in a lovely liminal space between documentary and sound art. “Life in the NHS captured in immersive stereo and specially composed choral music. NHS staff join with the Bach Choir to mark the 70th anniversary of the health service.” Weird and wonderful and now more than ever worth a listen. Thank you to every health worker in the NHS, and beyond, for continuing to work in this crazy, scary time.

The Coronavirus and Climate Change, the Great Crises of Our Time – The New Yorker Radio Hour

This episode of the New Yorker Radio Hour (one of few podcasts I set to autodownload) opens with in the Vermont forest that is home to Bill McKibben. He walks us down to a swampy marsh to listen to wood frogs croaking for mates. Slightly puffed, McKibben tells us we will have to wait a little bit for the croaks to start as they’ll be shied by his approaching footsteps. This sequence gave me some comfort in lockdown as I pine for the natural world (pun intended). The rest of the episode gives a depressing account of how and why President Trump is rapidly rolling back environmental protections, as well as a fascinating interview with a disease ecologist who hunts down viruses among cave-dwelling bats.

The Last Sound – Invisibilia

This episode is all about biophony which is one of my favourite things. Biophony evolved from the acoustic niche hypothesis, which in a nutshell, is the idea that all animals in a given ecosystem make sounds in different parts of the acoustic bandwidth. So they don’t talk over each other!

The hypothesis was made by soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause. In a move that I think is rare for Invisibilia, this episode involves only two voices – that of Krause and the interviewer/narrator. Krause is really engaging and he has a very interesting personal story as well.

The Songs of Trees – Conversations

A typically excellent interview by Richard Fidler with subject David Haskell, a biologist obsessed with trees. He recounts the year he spent visiting 12 of his favourite trees, including a palm on a barrier island in the State of Georgia; a pear tree in Manhattan; an ancient Hazel tree, which had become archaeological charcoal; and a bonsai pine which survived the Hiroshima bombing.

The way Haskell thinks about sound is eye-opening. The lack of an aural metaphor here proves one of his major points – our culture neglects the ears in favour of the eyes. But our hearing faculty is very sophisticated and we should spend more time focussing on it.

There’s also some amazing factoids about trees and the life they contain, such as a zombie fungus that lives in the trees of the Brazilian jungle. Ophiocordyceps unilateralis invades ants’ brains to control their minds, leading them to chomp into a leaves that are deadly to the ant but life giving to the fungus. Nature! You couldn’t dream this stuff up. More on this fungus here if you’re interested.

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Copyright 2019 Olivia Rosenman

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