🌂 Dismantled Mary Poppins 👻 serial killing-ghost 🔪 internet-less rabbit holes 🐇 the death of a host 🪦
🍭 👂 You’re all going to be horribly uncomfortable 🌈 🤸♀️
Bonjour.
Today is Monday, April 15. I am in Vancouver with Wil Williams at the TED Conference. If you are, too, come find me! In case this newsletter is too long…Mary Poppins but make it dark here, a story so well it doesn’t even matter if it’s juicy (but it is) here, the shocking death of a host I fell for here. Oh yeah and listen to Wil Williams’ new podcast here.
xoxo lp
👋q & a & q & a & q & a👋
Jazmine (JT) Green
**We’re interviewing creators from Audio Flux’s first two circuits—you can listen to them now. They have opened up submissions for circuit three to the public! Click here to learn more.**
Before you read, quickly listen to Jazmine’s Fluxwork ‘Hard Reset’ here. It takes three minutes!
Interview by Devin Andrade of .
Jazmine (JT) Green is an audio documentarian by trade and artist by practice. She is the founder of Molten Heart, a duPont-Columbia award-winning creative and commercial studio focused on the texture of sound. Molten Heart’s collaborators include The Met, Stitcher Studios, and Audible. IG: @cmdjazmine; jtgreen.me
Her practice explores the spiritual qualities of improvisation, the convergence of technology and the human body, and the intersection of gender and race through visual, performance, and sound art. She writes and produces electronic music as CMD+JAZMINE. Her projects and performances have been exhibited at The University of Chicago and ICU VCA, received recognition such as the 2021 Third Coast Award for Best Documentary Short, and featured at festivals such as On Air and RESONATE.
What previous media/creations of your own or by others helped inspire you for this?
In 2021, I created this fiction short NFT(ease) which was commissioned by Jim Colgan and Benjamen Walker for this festival, Unfinished. The festival explored the future of arts and government through technology, and in this period, NFTs were all the rage. NFT(ease) imagined a future where there was a marketplace for Black culture to be traded on the blockchain, marketed as a way for artists, couched in activist language, to earn reparations for their hard work. A young man named Derrick, tired of hustling for gallery representation, comes across The Block, and begins creating viral dances in hopes of selling his creations. And sure enough, two years after my piece's debut, an NFT marketplace for Black creators was announced in the real world.
Before shifting my trade towards professional audio, I worked in the publishing and advertising world as a designer and web developer, mostly working with tech companies and large brands to convince people to buy products and services. This influenced a lot of media which informed this piece, including Mr. Robot, No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood, Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler, The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour, You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier, Mercury Retrograde by Emily Segal, Algorithms of Oppression by Safiya Umoja Noble, Severance by Ling Ma, Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener, and Station Eleven.
What policy or practice in our current day feels like the biggest precursor to the ones that exist in your piece?
One, the continued miniaturization of technology (particularly with the fusing of self). Shortly before I was invited to this cohort, smartwatches for children were covered in a popular lifestyle report. The same week my Audio Flux piece debuted at On Air, Neuralink announced that the same technology I imagined was successfully used to control a handsfree interface in a test patient. Two, the increasing closed platform nature of an unregulated technology market. With increasing reliance on privately owned technology to do necessary tasks such as enter the subway or pay for food in cashless stores, platforms have the ability to control someone’s entire life experience which creates a lock-in that is as difficult to escape as changing your social security number. It’s likely that another pandemic or large force will disable our society yet again, and with government reliance becoming thinner with each hit (both politically and environmentally), it’s very likely that the only organizations with tendrils powerful enough to overtake them are global technology companies. And three, the growing wars on gender, sexuality, and freedom of choice. With our society in a space where everyone is interrogating the fraught system of our roles as humans based upon a doctor assigning a sex and (frankly) gender based upon organs, things can either go in the direction of an upheaval of this system, or a doubling down of medical categorization. Hard Reset, like all my favorite science fiction worlds, imagines the worst case scenario of these three outcomes, combining what feels to be a logical conclusion of these forces: technological miniaturization, governmental reliance on tech platforms, and medical-based categorization that has become so crucial to societal function, that a parent (or the government) is given the right to assign a tech platform at birth.
Having one of the companies named Rose and making their slogan say that “tinting your glasses isn’t so bad” was SO clever! How did you come up with the names and characters in your piece?
A popular thing technology companies do is both utilize branding and use materials that evoke organic environments and behaviors to soften what may be a scary thing to consumers. See: Lyft putting mustaches on the front of their cars, Apple watches designed like worry stones, ChatGPT saying “your welcome!” after a response. While this is a tool of creating comfort, all technology is born from organic materials to begin with, even if manufacturers want you to believe they were beamed from the gods of a designer’s brain. The essay “Sand in the Gears” in which Ingrid Burrington slowly grinds an iPhone down to its organic elements, acts as an exercise of remembering the material root (and consequence) of our technological future. Naming the two platforms Onyx and Rose, and creating their attributes on a rudimentary personality binary of “logic” and “creative”, and deploying cheeky branding for each, was a nod to these two ways of thinking.
Regarding the main characters, I based them on popular sci-fi archetypes (the freedom fighter, the doctor with a conscience, the tech leader with a good heart who accidentally becomes a power hungry mogul) while writing dialogue based upon the real life actors’ personalities.
What was the hardest part of making the idea in your head come to life through audio?
Frankly, because this piece was in the genre of near-future speculative fiction, translating it into audio was extremely simple. While much of technology is still based upon what you see, because of the continued miniaturization of products, companies saving money on screen technology by relying on audio, and the current advertising marketplace looking for new senses to monetize, these changing cultural attitudes of engaging with sound (people wearing wireless earbuds, voice assistants, audio ads, sonic branding, etc) made creating an audio only environment easier, because we are increasingly living in audio only environments in our real lives.
You were able to set up a world and introduce us to the rules so quickly. It made me want a part two or a whole series! How did you find the three minute time limit for establishing things and building an emotional reaction?
Because I used to work in advertising, I internalized the logic that building a world to engage emotion within the bounds of brevity is a feature, not a bug. Just like a pop song clocking out at 3 minutes, I wanted to make something that could be revisited and leave you craving more.
Choosing a fictional story for this piece opens up different creative and technical possibilities. What were you most excited about trying for this piece that was different from other audio projects you’ve made before?
The last two years I spent mostly producing non-fiction pieces, either autobiographical or deeply reported. I wanted to dive back into my imagination and build a world from the ground up. Also, I wanted to make a statement to myself as I believe that many marginalized creators are placed in a box where their only work of value is that that is deeply memoiristic and “shows what it's like in their lives” for the dominant culture to ingest and feel better about themselves after reading/listening/watching. I love seeing Black and queer creators create fantastical worlds that push the bounds of our reality, because we’re more than your source for inspirational content, we have a deep imagination too.
What was it like to create the dystopian world that your piece takes place in? How did you come up with the inspiration for it?
When I think of a new piece, I go on a walk with my voice memos turned on, and I just start talking aloud. I like to think of it as doing improv with my imagination. I usually start with an evocative prompt, like with this story, and work backward to think of all the steps and situations that would come about making that evocative prompt a reality. The story started with an idea: “what if there was a widely-adopted cochlear implant that also acts as a bodily and mind enhancement” and then worked backward to expand. In order for this implant to be widely accepted, society would have to see it as a net-good, which means it would have to be introduced as a solution to save the economy after a collapse which led many people to experience a trauma they never want to experience again. In order for this implant to be installed en masse, it would have to have a partnership with the medical system, be inexpensive and or free, and a technology company would have to have a non-technological incentive (platform lock in) in order to produce an expensive product with low profit margins. And what better way to do that in the most efficient and least expensive way than at birth when you’re already entered into the medical system and you have the potential for the earliest platform lock-in possible.
That, combined with my experience of living life as a transsexual woman, created the perfect storm for this world to exist.
I’m not gonna lie, your piece was a bit scary to listen to! It felt way too real or possible. What do you hope listeners take away from your piece or feel while they’re listening?
That you would either feel terrified about this potential reality or begin frantically searching for a private beta link to sign up for a Rose implant! I think both can simultaneously exist, because being aware of what makes a product, service, or even a political ideology sexy can help you deconstruct how tools of desire can be used to sway public opinion.
If you were to create another experimental three minute piece like this one, what lessons that you learned from this would you take with you to the next?
Three minutes of scene and dialogue goes a lot faster than you think. When I wrote the original script, it clocked out at roughly 15 minutes. John and Julie did an incredible job of finding the beats that were crucial to tell a three minute story, and use efficient wording and audible intonations that trimmed up necessary pages.
That, and making sure you feed your actors either hours before or immediately after you tape. While hilarious, I didn’t have “editing out burps and farts” on my post-production bingo card.
What do you hope Audio Flux does for other creatives in the industry right now?
What was excellent about Audio Flux was that the invite to create an idea based on a prompt was the key that unlocked an entire world that I would love to revisit and expand in the future. It evoked the spirit of Oblique Strategies—a portal into a subconscious universe that I may have not explored had I not heard the phrase “listening with.” It reminded me of my days of art school, where we spent an hour debating the meaning and properties of a circle on a chalkboard. Hopefully, with the days of the hyper-capitalist growth of the podcast boom times beyond us, we can have more moments of drawing a circle on the wall, and diving into it.
🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨
Matt Katz always thought his father was just an asshole who abandoned the family, but age 40 he found out it’s more complicate than that—his mom was inseminated with some random guy’s sperm, not the asshole who abandoned him. On Inconceivable Truth he’s letting us follow along as he searches for his real dad. Don’t get me wrong, this is insane. But I have heard storylines like this one before. Still…time stood still while I listened to the first few episodes of this podcast. I realized I was so invested in hearing Matt interview his mother and step-father I almost forgot that storyline wasn’t exactly why I was there. Matt’s in the middle of a really juicy saga but he’s the kind of storyteller where it doesn’t matter. I think I’d be on the edge of my seat to hear him talk about his family vacation or something.
hell yeah
⭐Podcast!⭐Group!⭐Therapy!⭐is scheduled for Friday, April 26th—we’re covering the versatility and power of podcast promos. Sign up here. There are still a few open spots!
✨What Nonfiction Podcasts Can Learn from Audio Dramas [via Podcast Marketing Magic.]
✨Arielle Nissenblatt spotlighted The Self-Help Junkie Podcast in her newsletter and podcast.
💎BTW💎
🎙️Hell yeah good news alert: the funny, brilliant Mortified (the podcast that asks adults to share the embarrassing diaries, letters, lyrics, etc. they created as kids in front of a live audience) will be popping back into our feed this year! (Earlier, it was announced that it was on hiatus.) They’ve shared more than 500 stories with us, but never the origin story, and this week, in celebration of the project’s 20 year anniversary, we got to hear it. It’s creator David Nadelberg’s letter that he wrote and never sent to a crush. It will absolutely make you very uncomfortable. Love this episode for the burst of good news and getting to hear the show’s history and future. Listen here.
🎙️Sometimes with live audiences, Ross Sutherland will choose a film and go to the plot keywords tab on its IMDB page and then begins to read them aloud, and members of the audience will try to guess what film he’s describing. One film in particular completely stumps audiences. Keywords: dysfunctional family, horse racing, losing ones job, medication object thrown into fireplace, punching through a hat, nonsense language, levitation…do you know what it is yet? SPOILER ALERT it’s Mary Poppins. For Ross’ new Imaginary Advice miniseries he’s using the elements in the Mary Poppins word cloud to create something new. The first episode kicks us off, and Jane and Michael Banks are there, but you will not recognize them. This is genius. Listen here.
🎙️At On Air Fest, I met Willa Paskin, which was a celebrity moment for me. It’s so embarrassing to meet your heroes, you should never do it. After I threw up on my shoes I mentioned one of my favorite episodes of her Decoder Ring was the slow dance episode before realizing that I have the memory of a goldfish and almost every time I listen to an episode of Decoder Ring, that is my new favorite episode because I love them all so much. It was later that I was literally bonking myself on the head for not mentioning so many others I loved—The Paper Doll Club, the Chuck E. Cheese Pizza War, the mall one, the Rebecca Black one. I do love the slow dancing one. ANYWAY I have a new favorite episode, which is about “Bookazines,” and I really mean it this time. Willa is talking about those one-off publications devoted to a single topic that look like a magazine and are sold where traditional magazines used to be sold, when they were a sustainable business. It’s a fascinating focus on the history of these zines, what’s inside them, how they work financially, and why people love reading, collecting, and writing them. (If exploring an internet rabbit hole without the internet sounds good to you, you might love them, too.) I was at Whole Foods (?) years ago when I saw one of these on Disney World and I picked it up thinking that I obviously needed it, and the sticker shock made me drop it by the time it was my turn at the register. (These things are expensive!) But this episode kind of explained why I picked it up, why some people wouldn’t have put it down, why I did, and how this all adds up to a business that is more profitable than the kinds of magazines that I am so, so nostalgic for and used to work in. Listen here.
🎙️I wrote about Hello, John Doe after the very first episode—I was captivated by the story (at age 45, Steve Patterson discovered his own missing person’s page and wanted to find out how) but also the host, Todd Matthews (a missing-persons investigator who was helping Steve.) I called Todd the Ted Lasso of true-crime. He’s the sweetest most optimistic guy you’ve ever heard on a true crime podcast. We got the finale, and it’s a doozie. Todd unexpectedly passed away. After spending so much time with him, I could hardly believe my ears. A bonus episode will come out on Tuesday that will be a celebration of Todd’s life. Listen here.
🎙️I get to talk to Wil Williams a lot (I’m lucky!) but one of the reasons I love their new podcast Nevermorphed is because I feel like I’m hanging out with them more. (As you read this, actually, I am in Vancouver with them.) They’re reading the Animorphs books for the first time with guests, and together they go over how much darker and weirder these books are than I’ve ever imagined, and how they were tiny lifesavers for some trans kids in the 90s and beyond who didn’t have other characters in fiction or real people to relate to. Wil’s reactions to the first one overwhelmed me with joy (they have a great giggle, and on a bonus episode we get to hear live audio recording reactions while they were reading the book.) I’m not going to read these books, there are 54 of them. At one point I think the authors were churning out a book a month? But I love this project so will listen as Wil reads on. Listen here.
🎙️Kattie Laur’s Pod the North launched its official flagship podcast Canardian, which you could call the Canadian Normal Gossip—it combines something that’s been proven to be podcast candy, hometown gossip, and Canada. Kattie and her guests are your tour guides to towns—they look to sources like eyewitness testimony, community Facebook groups, hometown Subreddits, Wikipedia…to dig into the juicy stories that aren’t about us but totally are. Episode one brings on co-host of Rooked, Jess Schmidt to talk about a “fake lake.” I love Kattie. Listen here.
🎙️Last Podcast on the Left’s two part series on Herb Baumeister was hilarious but also checks both true-crime and spooky boxes. (That’s something not as common as I’d think it’d be, and something we learned everyone wants in Ghost Story.) Herb Baumeister is one of those guys who should be more well-known, maybe it’s because his victims were mostly gay men and not straight white women. He would pick them up at gay bars and kill them in his home in the suburbs while his wife and kid slept. That’s part one, part two gets into the paranormal investigations and ongoing hauntings reported at Fox Hollow Farm, the Baumeister home. Google image searching it was making my skin crawl. So we have a guy went from plain old serial killer to ghost. Also, for those who aren’t sold on this show yet, I am not someone who enjoys murdery true crime stories, and I am not someone who is over the moon about dudes talking on podcasts. This is both and it always makes me laugh out loud. Start here.
🎙️I received a pitch letter podcaster Stephanie Summar and my eyes went immediately to the like “If you like Femlore I have to tell you about my show Paranormal Pajama Party and I thought, this person gets me! (I love Femlore, miss it so much.) Paranormal Pajama Party is a folklore/society podcast that covers ghost stories and legends featuring female phantoms and femme fatales, with a focus on the social and cultural contexts of each tale. Every episode is the equivalent of screaming Bloody Mary in the bathroom mirror when you're eight. (There is actually an episode about that.) But also pretend there is an academic in the mirror screaming too, offering insight into why the vanishing hitchhiker is always a woman and what that has to do with Sibyls, the Oracle of Delphi. If you have interest in fairy tales, ghost stories, history, feminism, and witchcraft, you’ll like it. Listen here.
🎙️At the Ambies, I was cheering for Jayna Marie to win the Best Wellness or Relationships Ambie for her podcast Big Lash Energy. We had met virtually a few weeks before and in person a few moments before. Jayna told me how just one year earlier she had been watching the Ambies in person, dreaming of being nominated and now here she was, a nominee in a gorgeous orange sparkly gown. Jayna is a makeup artist, and the podcast is the audio version of sitting in her makeup chair, having her tell you stories and pump you up. But Big Lash Energy is not what you’d expect. The sound production is creative and engaging, and the writing is great. I think Jayna should have been nominated for Best Host, too—listen to her for five minutes and you’ll fall in love with her like I have. The Ambies were over at 8pm and by midnight, she had dropped an episode using footage from the event (not sure how she did this.) She took her listeners through the whole thing. Episodes are creative and format-breaking. Jayna told me she doesn’t listen to podcasts, and I usually cringe when I hear people say that. But maybe that’s why Big Lash Energy sounds so special. Jayna has her own three-part version of Who TF Did I Marry? that’s a punched up with her sparkling personality, ability go get incredibly vulnerable, and the strong, funny voice that carries it all. Listen here.
🎙️I’m not an expert but it seems like 3 Million is one of the best histories of something almost nobody knows about, one of the single most horrific atrocities to have occurred under British colonial rule, The Bengal Famine. From 1943 to 1944, more than 3 million people died of starvation and malnutrition, and millions more fell into crushing poverty. It’s not just an astonishing story for the number of people who died, but for the lengths that the BBC went to so that British citizens wouldn’t find out about it. This BBC podcast really shits on the BBC (who eventually called this genocide [??] “the Indian Food Question” which would be so funny if it wasn’t despicable) for purposely covering this up. Saying this is the most exhaustive coverage isn’t saying much. There are no memorials, museums, dedicated archives. Nobody seems to know about it, we don’t know anything about the victims. For 3 Million (something Imran of Great Pods recommended to me at Podcast Movement) host Kavita Puri is digging up a story that really hasn’t been told, talking to people who haven’t been asked anything, uncovering pictures that haven’t been seen, and explaining why, exactly, famine wasn’t declared when it should have been and what it says about British colonialism. Listen here.
🎙️I love you!
📦 From the Archives 📦
[From August 31, 2020] I binged The Ballad of Billy Balls in record time for me (I discovered it through the Pocket Casts app, which was featuring favorite episodes of Lauren Ober. Thanks, Lauren!) Listening to it reminded me of reading a book I can’t put down. I was waking up in the middle of the night to continue the story, and I looked forward to any moments during the day I could snag to hear it. It’s technically about the 1982 murder of punk rocker Billy Balls, a death which affected the host’s mother and Billy’s Partner, Rebecca. Rebecca is destroyed by this, even after all these years, and her son iO is determined to get to the bottom of the mysterious circumstances of Billy’s death. iO whisks you away to the 1980s East Village, New York City (my very own street is referred to “the asshole of New York”) in an emotional journey that digs far deeper than the crime itself. The show is actually about a complicated, healing family, and whether or not digging for the truth is the right thing to do. I’m done listening to everything, even the bonus episodes, and I find myself missing iO, Rebecca, and Billy. I find myself looking for them while I’m walking around my neighborhood (even Billy.) I think I know people like Rebecca, the skeletons in this family closet feel familiar, and all of the characters in this story resonate with me although I have nothing in common with them. This story has swallowed me up whole.
I’m so excited to see Big Lash Energy made your list! 🧡⚡️
I'm glad we got to learn about the forgotten & tragic history.