It's The Bildungsroman Of Podcasts

Lowlines, a "sonic scrapbook," has the ability to transport you away to another realm; it sends you out into the world, and then brings you back a slightly changed human

It was very late in a day that had started too early after not enough sleep. By then, I had already spent more than four hours pacing around an airport waiting for a delayed flight that was only one hour long. 

I was exhausted. My legs were ansty and my nose was running, which it does as a last resort to remind me that what I really should be doing is sleeping. I was thirsty, and now hungry again; maybe my body thought it might be time for breakfast. Every small thing annoyed me; the cloying smell of the recycled airplane air, the margarine-tasting mini pretzels, another plastic cup for the trash that once held liquid that I couldn’t refuse.

With proper sleep still hours away, I resolved to attempt to disappear. My goal was to vanish my brain from my surroundings so that I couldn’t remember where I was any longer. 

That’s when I hit play on Episode 00 of Lowlines. It was a moment primed for some rage listening…tuning into something only to tear it apart for sport, just to feel better about how grumpy I was. 

Instead of feeling cramped and uncomfortable, Episode 1: Second Line dumped me in the middle of a marching band, the humid late-night air of New Orleans Mardi Gras sounding me, with the tubas, trumpets and trombones jazzing up my bones. 

For audiophiles, the lure of sharing and explaining the sound as you discover it is real; you want to offer a direct translation to your listeners of the moment and the place you found yourself with that microphone. Ideally, this is a binary experience—you record it and then you play it back, and that same magic that you discovered is evident to others.

As obvious as that sounds, it’s not really how this happens 

Microphones are funny in how they capture reality; what you can hear when you’re there with that 360-degree view, and have that potent emotion also full of other cues from your eyes, your nose and your gut, is not how it sounds to others. It gets flattened and becomes one-dimensional. Often, when you listen back to that tape, now far removed from the moment, it doesn’t always sound as good as you remember it. I went all the way to Antarctica to discover this truth about tape.

Recreating a sound for others to hear it as you did requires a whole other complex and multi-layered process; this is where the magic of sound design comes in, when a talented sound designer pulls apart the sounds, and then puts it back together again in a way that makes sense for our ears, and how they connect to our brains.

If you start with good sound, with good tape, then you stand a chance to recreate that experience for a listener. A sound designer, as Lucia Scazzocchio did with Lowlines, can allow a listener to see it clearly again; she helped me see the way I saw the musicians dance as they marched, trumpets dancing in the arms of the players with the bell of the horns reaching out for the moon, like a wolf howling at the sky.  

I’ve been looking for a series like this for a while, but I didn’t know exactly how to articulate it

A few weeks ago, I was driving my daughter somewhere and we were listening to her playlist. A track from Tame Impala came on. The baseline had a movement to it, which became the melody, and then the keyboard offered a response of some triads played with a beat, which answered the call of the bass. As this beat progressed, my thoughts went inside these bars of music, which overlayed the traffic pattern I was in, which then fed into the question that came up in my conversation.

The music became part of the fabric of what I was talking about, the environment I was in, and then all the thoughts that were coming to mind, which now had an overlay of a happy emotion.

My next thought was: I want to hear a podcast that can do that. I want to hear a story that has a beat to it, which will require me to have a physical reaction to it; something that evokes a sensation of motion and movement.

I want to hear something that puts me inside my own moment, not trapped inside a reality I don’t want to be in.

Was there a way to trade a set of carefully constructed facts that I need to deeply listen to in order to understand what is going on in this complicated story for something that makes me feel something instead?

Petra Barran achieved this with Lowlines. And it hit me at exactly the moment in which I needed it to be there.

Feeling a sense of inner deadness, Barran set out on an adventure to feel alive again. She went armed with an audio recorder—with basically zero experience and a 2-channel handheld Tascam portable recorder (retails for about $150 USD).

Petra Barran holding her Tascam to show me on our Zoom interview

 

Lowlines is the bildungsroman of the podcast universe. It’s a story where the protagonist sets off in one state, seeking to make sense of the world psychologically and morally, so that they can reframe and reset their sensibility upon return.

The narration arrives in the most unconventional way; if you’ve ever heard Kae Tempest, that’s what came to mind for me. It’s narration that’s both performed but also articulating details and descriptions. It’s a style that’s very hard to pull off without sounding like a toff, or heavily scripted and dramaturged. 

Stay tuned for the audio version, the podcast format from my Zoom interview with creators Petra Barran and Lucia Scazzocchio where we will get into the back story of how this series came together in the editing room

Did you know I also have Bingeworthy available on Spotify?

Before next, find a pair of headphones, ready yourself to be transported, and then get going over to Lowlines.

I’ll see you when you get back.

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