My heart is exploding with warmth & hope for thriving audio arts community. Thank you to everyone who came to Sound As Material with WAVS from @WBRU. All of the slides and resources I shared in the talk are available as a Google folder. DM for the link!

For now, I’ll share some highlights!
1.) Fill your cup with things that inspire you from everywhere possible—not just audio. I personally have one of my archives dedicated to only good things—things that bring pleasure & calm. Helps to avoid burnout.

2.) Some strategies for artful making that I’ve transferred from my other world (s).

-Studying sculpture, I was asked to recreate an object—this deceptively simple task taught me that aesthetic / material choices can transform or challenge something’s original meaning.

-In audio, this means that every choice we make to get closer to the “truth” of a person, place, or thing, is still a material choice—how our tape sounds, how & where it was collected, & how it is assembled—no one of those choices speak for the whole work. The work is all of it.

-When I am stuck in an audio project (or before one even begins), I like to play with physical materials. What if we gave ourselves the luxury of a material studio practice as audio makers? What if we had sketchbooks and studio walls and physical archives in addition to our DAWs?

Three propositions:
- (1) A Tiny Book for Your Feelings: write with found text.
-(2) Object Alphabet: assign meaning to objects other than words. Arrange your invented symbols to create material grammar, syntax, & metaphor.

-(3) I Used to Think Only In Pictures: For many of us, there was (is) a time when we were (are) without “words” in the spoken or written sense. How would that self tell the story you are trying to tell now?

One of the things I ended on was this image. A rough map of the kinds of people /spaces who make my creative work possible.

Artistic collaborators so often become friends and vice versa. These relationships are precious & deserve all the care we can muster. Treating each other with generosity, kindness, & respect makes us better artists & makes us stronger when institutions fail us.

The work I’m most proud of was made with longtime friends who trusted me also as a creative collaborator. We negotiated our friendship and artistic visions in real time, together.

The two audio works I shared today were:
“Slow-Burn Seeking,” created for BBC Radio 4’s Short Cuts with poet, healer, and longtime friend, Casey Orozco-Poore. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000gd0f

And “Perfect Love,” created for BBC Radio 3’s Between the Essays with my dear friend, Taehee Whang, one of the most sensitive and thoughtful visual artists I have the pleasure to know. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000dy2g

Artful work is possible when we trust each other to navigate the ambiguous and unspoken. This kind of work gets heard when we personally carry it into other spaces with us, or it is sheparded by those who believe in us. We are each other’s proof that this work is meaningful.

We all carry resources, skills, and privileges that are useful to the collective project of making space for art. We have to choose to lay them bare on the table, to share them out.

This means our access to professional networks that may typically have closed doors (known or unspoken).
This means tangible, financial support like subscriptions / contributions to publications we want to survive & to indie creators’ Patreons, funding streams, & aid projects.

This means our time—spent creating lasting educational materials that can be shared or creating ephemeral moments of dialog & connection.

And god, when we can go places, it means physical space. If you have a space to record in, to create & dream in, share that too if you can.

Thank you for building this digital space with me today. I sincerely hope to see you all in real space & time, ready to think & work together. In the meantime, I’m here for questions and ideas always.