Weekly space for the best and Public Radio podcast and storytelling I'm your host Ashley Unkrich bomb. Many of the shows that do really well in the podcast medium are the ones that consider each episode kind of like an issue of the magazine different segments made by a variety of contributors that all seem to hold the same tone so it's no wonder that the organist podcast has developed a loyal following over the years the organist is a monthly experimental Arts and Culture program edited by the award winning monthly magazine the believer published here in San Francisco by mix weenies the scope of the podcast reflects that of the print edition it's contributors take a thoughtful approach to pop culture along with an irreverent attitude toward the highbrow episodes include reported stories interviews comic radio dramas reviews and more. In this segment from the organist will tour a village in New Orleans that's more of an instrumental organism than a neighborhood. So from case here w. In McSweeney's this is the organist a manager Leland and on today's episode we'll hear from a group of artists musicians who are pushing Lucy is a Dia of using music to investigate space in an ambitious new direction for the organist of the writer Rob Walker visited these artists massive compound in New Orleans to hear the music that they've made using their houses and streets. Are. So we call this the clapping fibroids. You know it's a kind of interactive are fired by the way music venue by night something unlike any place in the world and part roadside attraction. Welcome to music box village it's a collection of structures arranged with an elliptical corrugated tin fence on a semi wooded acre next to a former metal fabrication shop in a remote corner of a neighborhood in New Orleans called by water some of the buildings look like shacks or shanties ramshackle but stylish there's a kind of porch with a t.v. Monitor built into the roof a freestanding kitchen with too many hanging pots and pans a huge cloth chandelier a vaguely steampunk phone booth and what looks like a water tower lots of reclaimed wood set at sharp angles steel beams and rusty metal like some daring architecture program decided to build its own experimental town that's not too far off all these structures are also musical instruments or at least they all make noise like these sounds coming from that large and. When using performer they play the venue itself. This is a device for the cure of this kind of the so kind of a homemade homemade analog synthesiser. That. Looks to the house here and there's a big giant step with the foot so far into the floor so for him and his that it medically just rattles and shake the entire house which is another you know the thing we have here in Louisiana is these these kind of. People go their cars you have this really loud bass the sounds and rattle they have like the rattling what's on the cars they're always shakes rattles the window of your house from New go by you know the kind of the idea of this was that it was. A self rattling house that's Taylor Lee Sheppard The Technical Director of Music Box He showed me around some of the architectural instruments like this one. Started singing. Constructed out of a. Deep delay pedals. With ideas that it that had a kind of speaking to this wall and it's we keep back to. The concept was like trying to mimic the of the voices on the other side of the wall in your house like for in your living this shotguns you can just hear everything that goes on your neighbors like every other business you told us because the walls are 2 inches thick and. All the way on top of that we have. An. Throw. Shit on the stop Hey Steve this is the way it is at Music Box village noisy there's always someone else playing music don't do that or a baby fussing. That's Odessa She's the latest member of i Village or even a nearby train like the one interrupting us now. We embrace these kind of city sounds but it's going to run that's Delaney Martin she's the artistic director of music box that yeah this is that one of the things that came with our site along with the bridge they getting ding ding ding ding ding and those that blew the last time we saw just past the train tracks there's an active into Austria waterway this far edge of the neighborhood feels and sounds more like a working port city that mean more densely residential areas up river and that's actually one reason Martin spent more than a year courting the fabrication shop owner before he retired and sold the Music Box founder's his unusual property I mean where there least I'm not sure is a new sound you know what it is a very magnetic That's Jay Pennington the other founder of Music Box village a few years after Hurricane Katrina Delaney and Jay started a New Orleans airlift an arts organization devoted to collaboration between local and national and international artists. Jay had this kind of falling down house and they wanted to do something with it we all just sort of are talking about this idea of performance and houses and idea of musicians being in the House they're playing their incidents of the musicians or the House they're playing there as we know they're playing in the house. What they came up with was the idea for the 1st version of music box the shantytown sound laboratory that was back in 2011 and at the time it was just an experiment but since then they've worked with scores of artists and multiple cities creating dozens of House like instruments and finally after a long search they found this new bigger location a permanent home for a whole village of musical architecture. I visited late last year right before the new music box was about to open its doors with a performance by one being an international exchange program for musicians I met a bunch of players milling around and testing their instruments like my name is could be Japan be it here and I'm from Zimbabwe Kirby was standing inside what looked like a phone booth with a spinning megaphones on top I asked him how it worked. On the basics this is what's up here. The switch up here on off and it would basically just give you the phones that are on top of the phone booth and that will stop the motion so the is that and then we've got a handle here that actually then controls the speed at which the phones on top of the booth are moving so you can decide what exactly you want and the cool thing about it is that unlike an ordinary p.a. System it's not amplifying in one general direction only but then it's up to firing a round so you get this sound that sounds like a bunch of Indians credit one jeans with. A drone. So you got more than a dozen one beaten zisha and scattered around this village playing their musical phone booths and water tower Calliope's and singing walls how do you get it to sound like more than just noise you recruit Mr Quinn try Hey my name is Quinn Tron I like your earrings. Are you in a band Quin Tron a fixture in experimental New Orleans music has been involved in a music box project from the start off and playing the part of conductor I realize that it needed a sort of outside I to cobble together the. Janky clackety houses to make an actual piece of music out of it because there's limitations in that people can't see or hear one another as well as you would in a concert setting or in a studio so it needed somebody kind of running around and pulling people together visually and keeping tempo and for lack of a better word conducting although it is nothing compared to it's similar to orchestral conducting but. Really what more running. And. What you've got someone playing something like the water tower thing or this wall of pedals. Do they just gravitate toward seconds obviously they're not going have a background in playing those things so they just kind of gravitate toward it and say I want to do this I worked with them enough with this particular group to kind of get a feel for who would be good at what and who would fall in love with what instrument and. So I put them on their stations and they're figuring it out and it takes a while because these are like. They're not chromatic instruments they're the scales don't make any kind of sense. You know drums or drums drummers like to beat on anything. But it's the the more melodic ones that are. You're starting from scratch . Along the way it's turned out that lots of people really love the idea of playing the venue many fresh Big Freedia the Wilco guitarist Nels Cline Thurston Moore Andrew w.k. Salon's Knowles among others have made guest appearances. And as curious as it may sound musical architecture when you experience it actually makes perfect sense one of the great things about it is this kind of democratizing of instrumentation because you know what we discovered in the initial music box was something just jumped up and down and simply pull that was something anyone can do and we're kind of pushing to the side those kind of things that you know a real musician knows how to play and going for things that a 5 year old can play or that their sin or else Klein arse launch nose can come up to and find totally challenging and like but because they're such great musicians they can do with it a 5 year old can't and that points to the notion that like houses and environments are musical things you know that the train going by is a musical instrument that the baby talking is a musical sound like you know these are all things that living in New Orleans you come to accept that's basically what we impart to the musicians and and then count on them to figure the rest out you know it's really nice to have a situation where you know someone everyone thinks of it as genius is no more advanced walking into our space than a 5 year old and that's something that musicians like accomplished musicians spend their whole lives trying to get back to you is the place where you're a kid with no preconceived notions or judgments about the instrument that you're playing on that's kind of like the in the goal in a lot of ways for musicians is to have that they capture that initial feeling of wonder. That piece was produced by Matt for the podcast The organist from k.c. Or w. And McSweeney and it was 1st released in April 2017 if you want to visit music box village check out their website music box Village dot com for all the details and you can subscribe to the organist anywhere you listen to podcasts. You're tuned to the spot on 91.7 k l w a weekly showcase of the best from podcasts and independent radio producers I'm Ashley and Craig. I'd like to continue the sport of music made by unconventional instruments with a selection from the podcast everything sounds each episode of the show shares untold stories about sounds that you've heard time and time again take for instance the ranks skateboarding is a very visual activity for its participants and spectators but the rhythm and the noises it can create are also important to the sport and to some artists musical. Well for us was. The real. Us. Since this is everything sounds. I'm Craig Shank And I'm George Drake Jr This is everything sounds. If you listen to the show for a while you know by now George and I have always been big fans of music we both grew up listening to it and I've played a little bit of it here and there Fun fact actually writes most of the music you hear in our episodes like this one that's playing right I don't like to draw attention to it but I think this one isn't better I think you've done better. But although bringing my musical preferences differ a little bit. That's a good way to put it yeah even though they differ we do have one similarity we both have an appreciation for musical sounds and music that's not always created with more traditional instrumentation and that's actually something we've run into quite a bit in past everything sounds episodes one of the 1st instances was all the way back in. Season one Episode 10 in fact George and I learned that just about anything can be percussive after a trip to the rhythm Discovery Center and I need applets it doesn't matter it had some upside down bucket a stick along a chain link fence just about anything in the world can become an instrument Exactly yeah you know you have the young kids at home you know banging on the pots and pans driving their parents crazy they're doing the same thing that a percussionist does you know not with the training obviously you know at a lower level but it's still the same concept. And not even 5 episodes later we ran into it once again when we were talking to Steve in my reading about his bicycle sounds video and the video is literally just moving bicycle parts against a black backdrop and they're just making noise but as you keep watching you may find yourself tapping your foot or nodding your head this sounds begin to interact in a somewhat musical way you know I wasn't to say trying to create a song or a composition but that's sort of how it turned out. But you know it wasn't well thought out like a normal like normal music but when you listen to it and it builds a lot of tension you know there's. There is a back which is the sound of this card that's just being flipped. You know which creates like this don't don't you know a driving thing and as you add and layer in all these other sounds from the different scenes it becomes more and more and more chaotic for an addict and you know finally. I was really ramped up that card gets in the clothing and it makes a list somewhere along the. You know I was really surprised that it's going to. Finally in the 1st episode of Season 2 we spoke with Nixon muito as a member of the books and with his new bands and mood oh he's incorporated sounds into his music that anyone could hear on a daily basis but they might not have thought of within a musical context to go searching all around for the sound. But we would go on and sort of the sound collecting runs sometimes we don't to the woods in the just like step on pine cones and that kind of thing which has a great song but yeah you find the sounds of branches breaking and pine cones being stepped on all over the living thing can last and save where their trees grow in the forest usually the bottom branches die as you know the forest grows up so you have all these little sticks that are kind of broken off there sticking out the bottom of trees especially pine trees if you go up to. The from piano they have a toad to them that is really beautiful. And you get like a really wide variety of different kinds of almost like xylophone sounds and those kind of things be close. And then here we are we found our way all the way back that concept once again sounds created without musical intention however intentionally used musically for this we spoke to a guy in Michigan Ok name or production alias I guess or both He's got 2 names. My name's Brad Finnegan otherwise known as was Sega and I am a music producer from here on out we would just refer to him as Sega you'll understand why in a 2nd so if Sega Craig and I grew up at the same time in the same city we probably all would have been really good friends because we all had one thing in common a love for skateboarding but I'm like Craigan myself with Sega actually mitts to not knowing how to skate I don't I did when I was in middle school and I was never good at it and so George and I we were those kids who wore the clothes and pretended that we knew how to skate George you said that you had a skateboard with a frog on it right yeah I had a frog Ok And equally as uncool I only did one trick in my life and it was in all e. And that's it but in our minds we were still skateboarders Kirk I think you're cool so I love the culture and I love the sport I just I'm not gifted in that way. It's his appreciation for skateboarding culture that allowed him to remain a part of it without directly participating in it he had been establishing himself as was Sega and producing music on his own time and that's when a friend of his who is also named Brad See I told you that's where it would have gotten confused right that's when Brad approached him about creating a song he really wanted to create the score of the skate film based on the sounds that the sounds of seaboard. He wanted to utilize each piece of his skateboard. In the form of an instrument to essentially create a new kind of gave video that you know even the music celebrated skateboarding in itself so Brad went to the skate park and recorded sounds of skateboarding all day and his intention was to have those sounds transformed into music so his microphone placement was pretty important the specific locations they used were things such as when the board pops when you go to do an Ollie or some sort of electric they would put the mike directly under the end of the skate board so that the collision between the wood and the actual cement ground would create a relatively Bapi jump instrument. And they would do the same sort of thing with let's say rail they would take the mike and hold the rail right at the point where someone would begin grinding So the skater would step all the way back and skate all the way forward and right when they write when they're metal truck where the wheels are held right when it made contact with that metal it created that percussion sound that was ultimately used in the track here's the thing Brad recorded the sounds while we're single was in Denver so he had no idea what he was going to get and really didn't have a safe or what he thought would work he just came back to Michigan and was handed the tracks which made it a little difficult to begin work I had time to conceptualize before the samples were actually taken. I could have had a more you know specific idea of. What samples I wanted to use more specifically where I wanted them to be placed and cetera et cetera but it made it more of an interesting challenge because it was you know you're given these plate of these sounds and it's basically like create something out of these and that's when things started to get interesting there he was with a variety of skateboard sounds that he didn't record but he had complete freedom to make whatever you want with them it was a matter of just searching through the skateboard sounds to find things that you could. Make representative relatively of real instruments so it became a challenge but in the end and without becoming a way more fun challenge than you know anything to fret over was Sega started editing those files to find the best moments those ones that he thought mimicked the sounds of actual instruments in a song started forming after he had called me and proposed this project to me I had absolutely no was so interested in doing something like that because I had worked with digital sampling before you know creating. Percussion instruments hitting things against the table all in one hand and it just took shape from that. One side it started to create eat everything else just kind of came to life around it and so I didn't really have another concept going in mainly because the concept kind of itself and that was what was so fun about the project as a whole is that escape like I thought utilizing the skateboard sound was going to become a challenge but once I actually you know cut them up put them in plays it kind of the rest of the track and have not a system of the track kind of you know came upon it so. You know when you think about it skateboarding kind of paths to the river the rolling of the wheels the grinding of the trucks the brakes of silence during the hang time it's rhythmic with skateboarding I think there's there's a have your element to it because you know when you stand and it's a part you're hearing all sorts of skateboard sounds from every direction and you can very much attribute rhythm to the sport but it goes much further than that and this Skeeter reliance on that rhythm they