Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
[00:00:01] Shawnee State Park is really the bottom of, you know, the southern most part of Ohio and is closer to Cincinnati.
[00:00:20] But the town of Shawnee is in southeastern Ohio.
[00:00:26] And again, you know, not a lot of people recognize that Ohio is like one third part of Appalachia.
[00:00:36] And so actually both of those places are part of Appalachia.
[00:00:40] But yeah, the village of Shawnee is different.
[00:00:43] Yeah. So you have a personal connection to the town.
[00:00:47] Correct. It's where my mother's family and ancestors migrated to in the 1870s as Welsh coal miners.
[00:00:59] And they lived there for several generations.
[00:01:02] And then my grandfather grew up there in the 1910s and 1920s and then left and moved to Columbus.
[00:01:13] So weirdly, I had never been to Shawnee as a child.
[00:01:17] I visited a nearby town where my father grew up all the time.
[00:01:21] But Shawnee became a sort of new place to me that was steeped in history and family history as an adult.
[00:01:31] And so it had a double edged sword there.
[00:01:34] I mean, it felt like I was a bit of an outsider, but also I had this familial connection that allowed me to introduce myself to folks that were there that may have known some of my relatives.
[00:01:47] Coal mining is really kind of the quintessential Appalachian job, I feel.
[00:01:53] Yeah. Yeah.
[00:01:56] Yeah, go ahead.
[00:01:58] Go ahead. Oh, no.
[00:02:00] Sure. Well, it is.
[00:02:03] And interestingly, Ohio's history around coal mining is an earlier one than what we most typically hear about in Kentucky and West Virginia, for example,
[00:02:15] which happened largely in the 20th century.
[00:02:18] But Ohio's coal mining boom was in the 19th century, and it was actually where a lot of labor disputes happened.
[00:02:26] And this small town, Shawnee, and the adjacent town, New Straitsville, is where groups of miners secretly met together to create the United Mine Workers.
[00:02:37] So it has a really strong labor history as well.
[00:02:41] And then the other interesting fact that is that area also has an underground mine fire that's been going on for nearly 140 years.
[00:02:51] So it's a it's a quite a it's quite an interesting, complicated, you know, beautiful, but then also, you know, environmentally and economically damaged place.
[00:03:04] There are a surprising number of those perpetual underground fires in the country.
[00:03:11] It's it's always Centralia, I think might be the most famous one.
[00:03:15] And I think they effectively had to evacuate the entire town because of it.
[00:03:22] Right. I mean, I haven't visited Centralia, but listening to it on some videos is a pretty wild experience because you can actually hear,
[00:03:32] you know, the crackling of the of the fire.
[00:03:35] I heard some people discuss with relation to to unionizing and the history of labor in America, the coal mining industry.
[00:03:47] And it makes a lot of sense that that has been such a central part of it because it's obviously a very difficult, not only a very difficult job,
[00:03:55] but one that ultimately is will damage your insides if you do it for long enough.
[00:04:02] Sure. Both inside and the environment as well.
[00:04:07] And so coal mining has has largely disappeared from this part of Ohio.
[00:04:14] There's still one remaining mine that's there.
[00:04:16] But it's really been a process of the environmental damage through acid mine drainage that people are dealing with now and the regrowth of the forest.
[00:04:27] So that entire area was clear cut.
[00:04:30] There was no trees left in the 1920s.
[00:04:32] Mountaintop removal, I understand, is a big thing as well.
[00:04:35] It absolutely is, although not in Ohio.
[00:04:40] That, again, took place on the larger mountains in Kentucky and West Virginia.
[00:04:47] And they had a massive flood in Kentucky.
[00:04:49] And I think that was a really big part of it.
[00:04:51] Oh, yeah.
[00:04:52] The mountaintop removal.
[00:04:53] Yeah.
[00:04:54] And Ohio's damage is really around that earlier mining and and then the regrowth of the forest and then ways to mitigate the acid mineral mine drainage.
[00:05:09] Your interest in Shawnee specifically, is that a direct result of having had family there?
[00:05:17] Yeah. I had been working with sound archives for many years as a composer.
[00:05:26] I'm trained as a composer and a sound artist, and I have incorporated field recordings and oral histories and sampling broadly into my work for many years.
[00:05:42] And I had been working in Kentucky at Berea College and working with their Appalachian Sound Archives.
[00:05:50] And it made me look internally and try to think about my own family and their origins.
[00:05:57] And so that brought me to southeastern Ohio.
[00:06:02] I went back to school.
[00:06:04] I also had a lot of questions, ethical questions around sampling and what that meant.
[00:06:08] And I wanted to learn more about it.
[00:06:10] And so I started a Ph.D. program at Ohio University, which is in Athens, Ohio, and and thought about ethnography as toolkit as a way of deeply hanging out with groups of people in southeastern Ohio so that I could connect the recordings that I was listening to with the actual people or the relatives of those people.
[00:06:33] And that didn't solve the ethical problems around appropriation and sampling, but it sure went a long way to figuring out paths through and a way to engage deeply with archival recordings and with communities of people.
[00:06:53] Now, the family history part of it sort of stupidly.
[00:06:57] It dawned on me as I was like visiting Shawnee for the first time as part of a class.
[00:07:01] And I realized that my family was from there.
[00:07:05] And so I had to really go back and talk to my living family members and then learn that history and then go through the town's archives as well.
[00:07:18] So it became a story about the place and then also a personal story about family.
[00:07:25] So that's just kind of a wild coincidence, you know, of all of the villages around southeastern Ohio.
[00:07:32] They happened to be ears.
[00:07:35] Yeah. And I mean, it's had a long history of obviously the labor history and the environmental history, but it's also a bit of a cultural center for the region.
[00:07:48] I mean, at most it had a couple thousand people living there, but they boasted having two opera houses, for example.
[00:07:55] And the Main Street, you know, a century ago is quite remarkable.
[00:08:01] I mean, it has it had it looked like an old western town, for example, with really unique architecture.
[00:08:08] Those two opera houses and a thriving economy.
[00:08:11] And then now it looks to the outsider's eye as a ghost town with everything, everything pretty gone.
[00:08:19] Yeah, which is not necessarily true.
[00:08:21] What's your sense of how they ended up with two opera houses?
[00:08:26] Well, they were competing against one another.
[00:08:30] I mean, I mean, it's also it was also due to the labor organizations.
[00:08:35] So they were probably both built by different, you know, labor societies that were competing with one another.
[00:08:43] And like I said, you know, then in the 1880s and 90s, all those groups came together to make the mine workers or whatever.
[00:08:53] So specifically, what were the ethical questions?
[00:08:56] It's effectively just the fact that you're using people's voices in your work who can't sign off.
[00:09:05] Well, I think when I started in the late 90s and early 2000s, the sentiment around sampling more broadly culturally was like, this is amazing.
[00:09:19] You know, the whole world is open to hip hop was was kind of the tip of that spear.
[00:09:25] And I had been working a lot with, for example, the Harry Smith anthology of folk music as a starting place.
[00:09:34] And and for me, I can't say that I was thinking about who are the people on the other end of these recordings and what are their lives and what are their families lives?
[00:09:47] And so it became a slow process and of really finding those connections.
[00:09:53] And so, for example, when I was in Kentucky, I was listening to recordings of this woman named Addy Graham, who I really loved, and then met her great granddaughter.
[00:10:04] And it just hit me like a ton of bricks.
[00:10:09] Like there are, you know, even though the recording was made 40 or 50 years ago, here is a living person that has family stories connected to those recordings.
[00:10:20] And it completely changed my attitude towards them.
[00:10:24] You know, it changed from like I can use whatever I want and use it however I'd like to, you know, I need to think about these family members and take them into consideration.
[00:10:34] I mean, these are not recordings of, you know, powerful people or famous people.
[00:10:40] They are of everyday people.
[00:10:42] So and oftentimes, you know, the recordings that I use might be of marginalized people.
[00:10:47] And so that has to really factor into, you know, my use of.
[00:10:53] With that last example, how can you be mindful that you're giving, as you said, marginalized people the proper respect?
[00:11:05] You can't. You can't ever fully answer the question or I personally can't.
[00:11:11] So from my vantage point and my own identity.
[00:11:17] We're two white guys named Brian.
[00:11:19] Exactly. I mean, I can give an example in 2010 or 2009.
[00:11:25] I was asked by Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago to work with the Sun Ra El Saturn collection there.
[00:11:33] And this is a set of like five or six hundred tapes that Sun Ra made.
[00:11:41] The the experimental bandleader and composer.
[00:11:44] Yeah, that's about two percent of his catalog, I would think.
[00:11:47] Yeah, exactly.
[00:11:50] Mostly while he was in Chicago.
[00:11:52] So during those years and I was asked, along with other artists and writers and filmmakers and musicians to reinterpret the archive as a celebration of its digitization.
[00:12:05] And as part of that process, I entered willingly into a contract with Sun Ra's nephew, who is the copyright holder of those recordings.
[00:12:16] And that contract explicitly said that he and the other people that were in charge of the recordings had the ability to not accept my piece, my work.
[00:12:30] And so it needed to go through that process of asking permission and then getting even another layer of permission for the project to go forward.
[00:12:41] And I saw that as an excellent beginning steps to answer that question that you were trying to get at there.
[00:12:51] Obviously, there's a lot more that you can do around research, around community outreach and so forth.
[00:12:56] But yeah, that was the start.
[00:12:59] But knowing that at some point that the they are going to be looking at this and giving this a thumbs up or thumbs down, does that affect the work from the outset or your approach to it?
[00:13:12] Yeah, it does. It totally does. And I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.
[00:13:19] I think that having those. Now, if it was again, if it was a sample, this is an interesting question because if it was a sample from, I don't know, a presidential library, for example, you see what I mean?
[00:13:32] That's a very top down archive, as it were.
[00:13:35] A public power person.
[00:13:37] Yeah. And so that relationship is very different.
[00:13:43] The power structure of that relationship is very different.
[00:13:46] And so I think I would approach it that very differently and be much more open to challenge, for example, or to think and listen critically.
[00:13:59] I'm still listening critically to the other material as well.
[00:14:02] But I think what it boils down to is just taking into consideration who the recordings are from and what's the best way to use them.
[00:14:14] Yeah, it's interesting. And I'm curious where Sun Ra slots into this is probably a bad word to use, but that hierarchy as far as yes, you know, Sun Ra obviously was black and he was black at a time when it was even harder to be black than it currently is.
[00:14:33] But in terms of, I don't know, power structure or in terms of your approach to it, is he closer to the president or the ordinary person in the archive?
[00:14:46] He is an intergalactic magical sun being.
[00:14:52] That's right. Yeah, you can't dispute that.
[00:14:57] Yes, I think he's absolutely on the side of the marginalized and that his work explicitly is about finding ways to circumnavigate that horrible world that he was in.
[00:15:14] If you grow up during the Jim Crow era, what is now called Afrofuturism, right?
[00:15:24] Which was his imagination and was a way of escaping and having something that could not be touched by anyone else.
[00:15:35] And then to come back and be able to live and work in this world, this flawed world while carrying around this mythology around himself.
[00:15:49] I think that that's a really intriguing and fascinating way to approach life and acknowledging that.
[00:15:58] So in my own project, I didn't try to imitate.
[00:16:04] I wasn't trying to wear really fantastical clothing or imagine that I was part of that universe because I'm not.
[00:16:15] And so I was able to try to be in dialogue with that material to understand it critically, but also to treat it with a certain amount of respect.
[00:16:27] And then I think another aspect of that is because there were other voices, other people participating in the same project.
[00:16:34] It made me less of an authority, which was great because I'm not.
[00:16:39] And it made several different people reinterpreting the same material.
[00:16:44] And at the same time, the listener can always go back and listen to the original material as well.
[00:16:50] And so there's a path back to the original author, as it were.
[00:16:55] And and so all of those things create like this web of interaction.
[00:17:00] I mean, the other side of it is that music and all creative acts are always a hybrid.
[00:17:06] They're always building off of these different things that we come across.
[00:17:11] And our instinct to combine disparate things and learn from it and make something new is really deeply embedded.
[00:17:18] I mean, the concept of musical borrowing is as old as music.
[00:17:23] Certainly in jazz. Yeah. Yeah, sure.
[00:17:26] Well, I mean, you can go back to like early notated music and it's like they're stealing the old Gregorian chant or something like that.
[00:17:33] So so, yeah, all of those things that I've been thinking about a lot, obviously.
[00:17:39] You use the word dialogue, and that's a really interesting way of phrasing it.
[00:17:44] I'm I'm a big Sun Ra fan.
[00:17:47] I saw the orchestra, Marsha Allen, when they were in town here in New York a couple of weeks ago.
[00:17:53] I would say that as musicians go, I would probably classify Sun Ra as being a genius,
[00:18:00] which that strikes me as being a lot of pressure as a starting point for creating your own music.
[00:18:06] It is. Yeah, absolutely.
[00:18:10] And I think what I could bring to that process is my skills at listening to archives and moving through archives and listening for in between moments is what I often call them.
[00:18:27] It's those interstitial parts before after a song when people are tuning up or in Sun Ra's case,
[00:18:36] when he was actually working with the orchestra and giving directions, the bits of dialogue that you could hear at the beginning of tapes,
[00:18:45] the natural decay of the tapes, all of these different sonic qualities of the medium of recordings is what I would say is my jam.
[00:18:58] So I focused on the things that I was very good at.
[00:19:03] And then I also asked improvising musicians to contribute to the to the project.
[00:19:09] Essentially, I worked and found archival bits that I really liked.
[00:19:14] I turned them into a kind of click track, as it were, and then asked these musicians to play alongside and letting other people be experts at what they are doing.
[00:19:25] And then and then I was able to collage all those things together.
[00:19:31] Was the disintegration loops, was that an influence to you at any point as you're describing sort of tape degrading over time?
[00:19:39] It reminds me of what he did. Yeah, I mean, I yeah, I remember when those came out.
[00:19:46] It came out William Basinski. I mean, he's just a phenomenal musician still creating really great work.
[00:19:52] And that absolutely influenced me.
[00:19:56] I think I was already working with archival materials when I first heard those pieces.
[00:20:01] But what really struck me about them was going back to his own personal archive and then allowing those things to deteriorate in those loops and then finding the beauty of those things.
[00:20:15] So I have thought about that a lot.
[00:20:19] I mean, I mean, it's it's it's probably connected to some kind of interest in different media and mediums.
[00:20:27] So it's like the working in archives.
[00:20:32] You can't help but hear the layers of noise or information from like if it's recorded on an early 78s and then recorded to tape.
[00:20:44] And then digitized, you get the pops and the cracks.
[00:20:48] Yeah. And then you also hear, you know, it's how it's been sitting on the shelf or you can you can identify those different things.
[00:20:56] And the phrase that I really like about that is it's a kind of noisy memory and it's not alphabetic.
[00:21:07] It's not, you know, around words that we can understand.
[00:21:11] It's sounds and the sounds have the information that's beyond how we can talk about it.
[00:21:18] And that to me, from I suppose a media studies perspective is a really, really fascinating way to think about all these old things.
[00:21:26] I should also say, I mean, you can see behind me, I mean, I've got like these old radios and stuff like that, which is what I grew up with.
[00:21:33] Like my dad just repaired old radios and record players and stuff like that.
[00:21:38] So I was constantly being woken up early in the morning by the hiss and hum and the crackling of all these old things.
[00:21:46] It's something I hadn't really thought of, but the the time frame of disintegration loops is interesting as well being the turn of the millennium.
[00:21:57] And really, in some sense, kind of the last throes of that world of physical media.
[00:22:08] Yes. And of course, you know, I think everyone or myself and not everyone, but I don't it wasn't it wasn't composed around 9 11.
[00:22:19] But it's certainly that's when I think it was like from 20 years.
[00:22:24] It was over a long period of time.
[00:22:26] Yeah. And seeing it in that context, it felt like an end of something.
[00:22:31] Now, I mean, I, you know, I grew up listening to the early Steve Reich and those tape loops there and had an interest in repetition and tape loops and things falling out of sync.
[00:22:48] But I think, yeah, with the Basinski, I mean, it was things falling apart.
[00:22:54] That was so that was you know, and to make it simple enough, simple enough that you could you could observe that and really see the beauty in it.
[00:23:04] That's I think that's the real charm of that piece.
[00:23:07] Yeah. In this hierarchy that we were establishing previously, where does where does Thomas Merton sit?
[00:23:15] Oh, yeah. He's an interesting figure, right?
[00:23:19] Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk who lived from 1915, I think, to 1968.
[00:23:31] And he was a writer first and foremost.
[00:23:35] No, he's probably a monk first and foremost. Sorry.
[00:23:37] But he couldn't help being a writer as well.
[00:23:41] And he grew up just generationally in between the beats were about 10 years older than or 10 years younger than him.
[00:23:51] And the existentialists were about 10 years older than him.
[00:23:54] And the way that I like to think about his writing is a mix of those two worlds and then obviously filtered through his religious and spiritual practice, as it were.
[00:24:13] So, yeah, yeah, but that doesn't help you answer that spectrum question.
[00:24:17] But yeah.
[00:24:18] I read Philip Glass's memoir about a month or two back and, you know, he's he's a little bit postbeat.
[00:24:30] But it does. He was somebody who, you know, certainly has been much like John Cage, very interested in Eastern thought.
[00:24:40] And that, you know, that plays a role in the music he makes.
[00:24:44] It was I think it might have been Cage who used the I Ching to actually or maybe it was Glass.
[00:24:51] I can't remember which one.
[00:24:52] Cage. Yeah, John Cage.
[00:24:53] Okay.
[00:24:54] You had to help him help him compose.
[00:24:56] And obviously the beats were tremendously influenced by the early early in terms of America's and Buddhist's coming over to the states.
[00:25:10] You know, the Dharma bums, for example.
[00:25:12] Right.
[00:25:13] Yeah.
[00:25:14] And, you know, Merton was in dialogue with DT Suzuki, who really introduced a form of Zen Buddhism to the United States.
[00:25:25] He was also friends with the Dalai Lama, for example.
[00:25:29] So he he really was one of those I suppose you'd call him a spiritual master.
[00:25:36] And but all of that stuff was less interesting to me, I have to say, than his openness and curiosity and vulnerability that I kept seeing in his journals.
[00:25:50] And it made me curious as to whether he had recorded anything.
[00:25:54] I knew there was a lot of tapes of him teaching.
[00:25:57] He was teaching the young monks history and so forth.
[00:26:02] But that felt too, you know, public facing.
[00:26:07] And I mean, he's like pontificating and it's not I mean, to my mind, it's not as interesting.
[00:26:13] So I visited the archives and archivist there after I told told him what I was looking for shared with me this series of courtings that had not been released before.
[00:26:25] And it was basically that one of the monks brought him a tape recorder into his hermitage where he was staying by himself and brought him a tape recorder.
[00:26:34] And he immediately started to use this tape recorder as a creative practice, but also as like a contemplative tool.
[00:26:42] And right away, he's trying to test the limits of the machine.
[00:26:49] He's making field recordings.
[00:26:51] He's doing experimental, you know, he's playing records on top of it and then like improvising on top of that.
[00:26:58] And and then questioning it as a medium.
[00:27:03] And it just happened to be the exact time where he had come out of having an affair with his with his nurse.
[00:27:10] So he and he had decided to stay a monk and not and not go off and get married or whatever.
[00:27:18] And I think there was just like this great sadness.
[00:27:23] And he'd been really cracked open.
[00:27:25] And you can hear it in the tapes.
[00:27:28] You can hear that vulnerability in his voice.
[00:27:31] There are moments when, you know, he's almost you can hear like a slight warble and a pause in his voice.
[00:27:39] Now, of course, I've listened to the recordings hundreds of times and I might be adding my own, you know, my my own agenda to it.
[00:27:47] And I might start to hear things that aren't there.
[00:27:50] I'm certain I could be guilty of that.
[00:27:53] But I really do think it shows a level of vulnerability that you can't find in his writings necessarily.
[00:28:03] And there's an old phrase by, you know, a psychological phrase, which is like speech reveals your words and text conceals so that our writing can be very descriptive.
[00:28:17] But the speech itself and hearing it has an extra layer of information on it that is that can that can help us discern what a person is thinking or expressing.
[00:28:30] That's part of it, sure.
[00:28:32] But, you know, you were alluding to the difference between these effectively journals and his teaching, which is much more structured and was public and more importantly was he intended
[00:28:46] and was aware of the fact that it would be consumed by the public.
[00:28:51] And as we're talking about certain ethical concerns around this, I'm curious.
[00:28:56] This is a this sounds like a very personal thing that he did that he didn't necessarily expect people to listen to.
[00:29:05] That's true.
[00:29:07] And yet I could be wrong.
[00:29:11] His journals, which are were my way into really admiring Merton were published 20 years after his death.
[00:29:22] And and they I think he had arranged for them to be published.
[00:29:28] But because of the sensitivity of, you know, people that he was talking about, he wanted that to wait until many years later.
[00:29:38] And I think that these recordings would fall under that same umbrella as it were.
[00:29:44] In fact, I think that the recordings are really an extension of those journals to my mind, at least.
[00:29:51] And so you're right.
[00:29:53] They were not necessarily for public consumption.
[00:29:56] And yet he had already made arrangements for his estate to be publicly consumed, as it were, under this trust.
[00:30:05] So that might be the way in.
[00:30:08] And then again, as far as my own permission, I had to get permission from the Thomas Merton Trust, who owns all the rights,
[00:30:16] as well as I worked with one particular monk in particular named Paul Quinlan, who was the monk who gave Merton the tape recorder
[00:30:28] and got his informal interest and permission to go ahead.
[00:30:35] When you said he was questioning it as a medium, what did you mean?
[00:30:42] Well, you know, at that time, he was reading a lot of critical theory, as it were, and specifically Foucault.
[00:30:55] And he was also a lot of Sufi mystics.
[00:31:03] And he was thinking about us as people being two sides of the same coin, what we say externally and what we feel internally.
[00:31:16] And then he started to relate that to the recorder itself, the recorder being this lifeless box that yet was speaking back to him as he spoke to it.
[00:31:31] And then he would play it back and listen to his own voice.
[00:31:34] And so as the process of doing that made him question maybe he wasn't, maybe he was saying too much off the cuff and not from the heart.
[00:31:44] And it made him think about choosing his words more wisely, as it were.
[00:31:50] But I think it was just a general sense of interrogating the recorder.
[00:31:56] And also he had been reading a lot of Samuel Beckett.
[00:31:59] I do hear a plane flying over.
[00:32:02] There's a Samuel Beckett play called Craps Less Tape, which is about an old man listening back to his life through his recordings that he made each decade.
[00:32:14] And I just thought about Merton doing the same thing, where he's self reflecting and questioning what he's written and who he is constantly.
[00:32:27] And then reaffirming this desire to be in solitude and just to being literally open to the world.
[00:32:38] That's interesting too. And, you know, I could be fudging this a little bit, but it seems that the time frame we're talking about here is sort of right on the cusp of McLuhan coming around and really interrogating the medium.
[00:32:52] Yeah, yeah. I don't know the years where those, you know, the medium is the message or the massage.
[00:33:01] Yeah, if we're talking about the 60s here though, that must have been, you know, right before, I would think.
[00:33:06] Yeah, and again, I met some Merton scholars over the summer and they really know a lot.
[00:33:14] But yeah, that I wouldn't put it out of the realm of possibility and that he's, you know, definitely concerned and interested in different media.
[00:33:24] I mean, but what I think he does is he inserts his contemplative expertise and practice into these different things.
[00:33:34] So, for example, poetry, he wrote experimental poetry that could hang with, you know, Samuel Beckett and those style of that style of writing.
[00:33:47] But it always was through that contemplative lens, as well as painting.
[00:33:52] He did a lot of painting and then photography as well.
[00:33:56] So with each of these mediums, he was doing the same thing that he was doing in the writing, which is a curiosity, an intellectual curiosity,
[00:34:06] but also like just a spiritual curiosity about what these things could offer.
[00:34:14] Was it spirituality that drew you to him in the first place?
[00:34:20] Well, I grew up in a very Catholic household and a very loving family.
[00:34:30] But when I was a teenager, I started to think more critically about a lot of this, a lot of my own religious upbringing.
[00:34:42] And that sort of led me to Merton because Merton was within the Catholic Church, but also very comfortable in questioning it and quite, you know,
[00:34:53] was quite rebellious in the 60s in particular, coming out against the Vietnam War and nuclear proliferation and around environmental issues, for example.
[00:35:03] But also in befriending and being curious about other religions.
[00:35:09] And that to me was a way to learn, to open up myself beyond what my own upbringing was and to sort of very gently enter into an argument with my parents
[00:35:23] over the years around that religious upbringing.
[00:35:28] And so it was very important for me as a teenager and then into my early 20s.
[00:35:33] And then I sort of let it all go.
[00:35:36] And I didn't return to it again until just a few years ago because I was trying to find that style of writing again.
[00:35:45] That seemed self-assured, but also uncertain at the same time and very open.
[00:35:53] And so I went back to the journals and reconnected with those.
[00:35:57] And then that led me to the recordings.
[00:36:00] Did you get the sense that those conversations or arguments with your parents moved the needle at all as far as their opinions on the subject?
[00:36:11] I don't know the answer to that.
[00:36:14] I mean, it wasn't a huge, huge blowout style argument or anything like that.
[00:36:25] It was just kind of like an ongoing dialogue.
[00:36:28] As I continued to grow and change, they were always willing to listen.
[00:36:33] But I think that they, you know, to their credit had always stayed firm in their ideas and beliefs.
[00:36:40] And I never wanted to change them necessarily.
[00:36:45] I just became so curious about everything else that I needed to go my own way too.
[00:36:52] So would you say your father was religious?
[00:36:56] Absolutely. Yeah.
[00:36:58] Yeah, I think my mother is more of a contemplative and she took it very seriously and was part of an order of contemplatives.
[00:37:14] And so I grew up being very curious about the idea of contemplative practices.
[00:37:21] But for me, when I learned that, you know, that could also take place with Sufi mystics or Zen masters or Buddhists or what have you,
[00:37:33] that practice of silence and being open and vulnerable to the world felt like a, I mean, no one really uses the word universal anymore,
[00:37:48] but it did feel like a more human quality that was deeper down than any one particular practice.
[00:37:57] So that was the thing. Yeah, that was that.
[00:38:00] I mean, that really felt like a gift that my mom in particular gave to me and my father was much more quiet about it, but also very steadfast.
[00:38:10] And his world was much more physical and it was rooted in work and in objects and repairing a lot of different types of objects.
[00:38:24] It seemed like there was nothing that he couldn't repair.
[00:38:27] And so he's a very mechanically minded person.
[00:38:32] So it's that combination of those two different things that I think is really interesting.
[00:38:36] Would you say that that was both his job and hobby?
[00:38:41] Yes. So, yeah, he was a typewriter repair man, which is a very antiquated job now.
[00:38:48] There are no such thing.
[00:38:51] And he did that his whole career.
[00:38:53] And then when he retired, that translated into antique radios, turntables, anything having to do with tubes and transistors and sound was really up his alley.
[00:39:08] Are you mechanically inclined at all?
[00:39:11] No, no, no, I am not.
[00:39:16] And that was one way that we could connect, though, because I would always bring him things that I knew that he could repair that I couldn't.
[00:39:24] So it was a way of connecting.
[00:39:27] There were there were a lot of ways that we were very different.
[00:39:30] I mean, I grew up very artistically minded and deeply into classical music to begin with and training as a classical musician,
[00:39:42] which couldn't be further from my father's upbringing in Appalachian, Ohio.
[00:39:48] I hear that in some towns they have two opera houses.
[00:39:51] That's true. I think it's a different kind of opera.
[00:39:58] Yeah. Although, yeah, my grandfather and my mom's side was a musician.
[00:40:05] So I suppose there's a bit there.
[00:40:09] But my father saw the world through his hands and understood it very, very differently than I.
[00:40:17] And yet he was always encouraging.
[00:40:21] And even though he didn't understand what I was doing and often thought that I should get a real job, as you know, as he would say, he still supported me through all those years.
[00:40:34] There are ways on the face of it in which obviously they're opposites, but ultimately maybe they're not too far from one another.
[00:40:46] I mean, obviously, I don't know.
[00:40:48] There are probably ways in which repairing, especially in old analog devices, is creative.
[00:40:55] And certainly you have a job that requires, especially as a pianist, you to use your hands.
[00:41:02] That's absolutely true. Yeah, I. Yeah, for sure.
[00:41:08] There's a lot. I mean, I'm sure there's a lot of ways that it connects.
[00:41:14] And it feels closer now than it did obviously when I was young.
[00:41:18] So you you you go out and you're trying to assert who you are and defining yourself perhaps against your family or other people that you've known.
[00:41:30] But as I got older, I could see definitely those connections for sure.
[00:41:35] And I have such a strong interest in the old objects themselves, too.
[00:41:42] But I'm looking at them from a slightly different angle or listening to them from a different angle and trying to grasp them as as a musician,
[00:41:53] as someone working with sound and even through writing or what have you.
[00:41:57] So, yeah, they're complimentary. I'll say that.
[00:42:00] When did he pass? It's twenty twenty one.
[00:42:05] So two years ago. Yeah. A little over two years ago.
[00:42:07] That really directly spurred this project on.
[00:42:11] It did it. The project, the workbench is really because after he died, part of the process of of dealing with that was to help my mother clean up the house and eventually get it ready to be sold.
[00:42:34] And that meant going through all of these objects of his.
[00:42:38] And the workbench was such an important part of me growing up because I would sit there and obviously watch him work and tinker with things.
[00:42:46] And so sitting there, I was trying to imagine, could the objects themselves have a kind of agency?
[00:42:54] Could they somehow connect me to the past or to this person that I have known my whole life and have obviously loved?
[00:43:03] When we're talking about archival recordings or these Thomas Merton recordings, like that is a tangible connection to past lives.
[00:43:11] Yeah. But now you're talking about the hardware in a sense, the hardware that that was recorded on perhaps.
[00:43:17] Yeah. Well, yes. So on a tape recording, you can hear someone's voice.
[00:43:23] But, you know, in this radio that this person repaired, what can you notice?
[00:43:28] You can see the grain of the veneer that's been redone.
[00:43:33] You can see the craftsmanship and repairing the pieces or what have you.
[00:43:39] You can see the dedication of someone's wanting to make this object beautiful.
[00:43:45] And so maybe those are the things that I started to pay attention to.
[00:43:48] When you inherited the workbench and these objects, were you at all motivated to try your hand at repairing things?
[00:44:02] You know, I've tried over the years a little bit.
[00:44:06] And I just have never had the knack for it.
[00:44:11] So, you know, but now I have all these tools.
[00:44:14] But I will tell you one thing is that I basically took the workbench and set it up in my own garage.
[00:44:21] And almost immediately, my son started coming out who's a teenager and a budding musician.
[00:44:29] And he brought his guitars right out there and started working on them.
[00:44:33] So he gets the best of both worlds, it sounds like.
[00:44:36] It was totally fascinating. You know, it was very unprovoked.
[00:44:40] And I saw that as being, you know, oh, yeah, the workbench itself is a kind of gift.
[00:44:48] It doesn't have any monetary value, but it has this value as being a gift that I can then, you know, allow my son to use.
[00:44:58] And then that puts the gift in motion that puts that allows that that physical object to be activated, as it were.
[00:45:09] Genetics are fascinating, aren't they? Yeah, totally.
[00:45:14] Sometimes things skip a generation and yes. Yeah.
[00:45:19] Yeah, go ahead. No, no, no, please.
[00:45:21] I was just going to say, I mean, that's what happened with my grandfather on my mother's side, the one from Shawnee, who I never knew.
[00:45:28] And he was a musician, but he died before I was born.
[00:45:33] So, you know, I never got to experience any of that.
[00:45:37] And so part of, you know, part of growing up was people telling me, you know, oh, you're you're very much like, you know, your grandfather, even though you don't know who he is.
[00:45:47] So genetics are extremely weird.
[00:45:51] Obviously, your son knew his grandfather. He knew my dad. Yes, he did.
[00:45:56] And so. But I suppose he's 15 now, so, you know, he knew him for, you know, 13 years or whatever.
[00:46:04] And kids, kids are funny. I mean, they don't look like they are processing anything.
[00:46:10] But years from now, I'm sure they'll have all kinds of thoughts and memories around it.
[00:46:16] Back to the ethical conversation that we were talking about before.
[00:46:20] As we were discussing field recordings, one of your one of the ways in which you felt like to a certain extent you were able to address it was contacting the family members.
[00:46:30] This is a this is an interesting case because you are the family member.
[00:46:34] Yeah, this case, obviously, you know, we're talking about some like, I think, voicemails answering machine messages on here.
[00:46:40] So things that, again, like perhaps Thomas Merton, he didn't necessarily your father didn't necessarily expect that people were going to be listening to.
[00:46:50] How does ethics play a role when you're doing a project like this with your father?
[00:46:56] Well, yes, it's so it's so personal and the recording at the end of the piece, you know, I made while my dad was in hospice.
[00:47:07] And he was in that those last stages of life where you're essentially asleep and and and it was just the breathing.
[00:47:16] And I don't know why I even made that recording, to be honest with you.
[00:47:22] It was just instinct, knowing what I know about you based on this conversation.
[00:47:28] That's how you process things. Yes. Right.
[00:47:31] Right. And so I didn't even know if I would use it or not.
[00:47:38] But I was very worried to get to your question.
[00:47:41] I was very worried about my mother in particular, you know, hearing this recording and and I have four sisters.
[00:47:48] So I was spent a lot of time trying to soften the blow as it were.
[00:47:54] But my mom was OK.
[00:47:56] And and I think she really appreciated and saw what I was doing.
[00:48:01] And then my sisters have commented in different ways, all all wonderful around it.
[00:48:08] And they've essentially agreed that it's a kind of gift for for other people as well and that I'm I'm OK.
[00:48:19] I'm OK with that. Yeah.
[00:48:21] It's it's it's very personal, very, very hard.
[00:48:23] But I just think there's something very deep there that can resonate with.
[00:48:29] Well, everyone at some point in their lives has to deal with obviously their own death, but then the death of others.