All The Best

Earlier this month, our Melbourne Collective hosted a listening party with stories and sounds about distance. Last week on the show, we picked up signals from faraway. Today, in Part 2, we’re finding out what happens to the people who stay home. How do you communicate across distance? Can you bridge the gap?

Compromise

Michael and his partner Manderlee navigate the landscape of sharing a bed and try to figure out what’s better: sleeping alone, spooning, or a pillow substitute? You can hear a longer version of this story on the SleepTalker website.

Produced and scored with original music by Michael Brydon.

Can You Hear Me?

Mobile technology can put us in the pocket of someone on the other side of the world. But when the signal drops out, we might end up even further away than before. In this story, we wade through static on a long­distance phone call. Produced by Bec Fary.

Mother/Abai

Afghan ­Hazara migrant Taqi Khan came to Australia as an asylum seeker. Afghanistan is still riddled with danger, and the Hazara people are still suffering. Taqi wrote this letter to his mother. This piece features original music, sung in Hazaragi by Taqi Khan.

Produced by Josie Smart and Izzy Roberts­Orr for the ‘Dear/Hello’ segment series.

Honey Jumble/Almond

Izzy (aka ‘Almond’) shares sound letters with her distant pen pal, John (aka ‘Honey Jumble’).

Produced by Izzy Roberts­Orr.

Music credits ‘Mr E.'s Beautiful Blues’ by Eels, ‘PS’ by The Books, ‘Untitled’ by Barr, ‘Sensitive Fuck’ by Major Napier, ‘I’ll Be Right Here’ by Parking Lot Experiments.

Oceans Apart was produced by the All the Best Melbourne Collective: Bethany Atkinson- Quinton, Michael Brydon and Bec Fary. The music at the end of this episode is ‘Can’t Take You With Me’ by Bahamas.

Supervising Producer: Bec Fary

Features Executive Producer: Heidi Pett

State Coordinator: Bethany Atkinson­Quinton

Community Coordinator: Aidan Mollins

Presenters: Pip Rasmussen and Michael Brydon

What does distance sound like? Today on All the Best, we’re crossing borders. We’re traversing long distances. We’re picking up signals from faraway.

Earlier this month, our Melbourne Collective hosted a listening party with stories and sounds about distance. On the show today, we’re hearing three stories from the night.

Ernesto Juan Castellanos

An excerpt from May Jasper’s soon­to­launch podcast, Random Article. May speaks to Cuban author, journalist and filmmaker Ernesto Juan Castellanos about how to be a hard­core music fan under a regime that sent pop underground.

Produced by May Jasper with sound design by Bec Fary. Music: ‘Love Me Do’ by The Beatles, ‘Wish You Were Here’ by Pink Floyd, ‘Baby Let Me Take You Home’ by The Animals, ‘Revolution’ by The Beatles and ‘Revolution 1’ By The Beatles.

The Yearn to Return

Can we stay connected to the places of our past? Made Stuchbery looks at nostalgia, and the pull of memory.

Produced by Made Stuchbery. Music: ‘Dark Water’ by Podington Bear and ‘Down By The River’ by Neil Young.

Gannet Migration

Maddy Macfarlane watches and listens to a group of gannets on their seasonal shift.

Produced by Maddy Macfarlane.

Oceans Apart was produced by the All the Best Melbourne Collective: Bethany Atkinson- Quinton, Michael Brydon and Bec Fary. The music at the very start of this episode was ‘Piano Froze Beat’ by Jai Leeworthy.

Supervising Producer: Bec Fary

Features Executive Producer: Heidi Pett

State Coordinator: Bethany Atkinson­-Quinton

Presenters: Pip Rasmussen and Michael Brydon

Duck Season

On the opening weekend of the duck hunting season two groups of people converge on a lake in rural Victoria. Each believes in their cause so passionately that they wake up at 4 in the morning to wade into icy water and stand there for hours. Half of them shoot the native wildlife, and the other half get in the way.

Produced by Leona Hameed

Music: With Stars for Eyes by h+, Black Lake by Real Estate, Inner Lakes by North Hive and  Submerging Blue Black by Podington Bear

Jailbreak

Produced by Tiger Webb

The Cairo Citizen's Police

Produced by Kim Tan

Features Executive Producer: Heidi Pett

Melbourne State Coordinator: Bethany Atkinson­-Quinton

Presenters: Pip Rasmussen and Michael Brydon

Community Coordinator: Aidan Molins

SYN Production Manager: Bec Fary

Episode image: Leona Hameed

You see a familiar face on the street. It's someone you knew a long time ago. You couldn't place a name, but you remember being very fond of them. You near each other, your eyes meet, you're about to pass, you open your mouth, and in a second they are gone, moving onwards in the opposite direction.

Neither of you stopped or even smiled. It might have been something - you could have asked then for a drink, placed their name while your fumbled for your phone. But the moment is gone. All you're left with is what might have been.

This week on All the Best - missed moments, alternate paths, loves lost, whole cities never realised.

North Arm

There’s a place on the north coast of NSW called North Arm Cove. There are 400ish residents, no shop, no town water, but they do have a tennis court they built with money from the government's GFC stimulus package a few years back.

But North Arm Cove was slated to be something much bigger. For a brief, shining moment, it might have been the capital of Australia, designed by Walter Burley Griffin. That didn’t happen, obviously. But plans were drawn up and roads carved through the bush, and due to a strange confluence of planning laws and economics, a small community lives in a perfectly planned city that's mostly gravel boulevards and eucalyptus trees.

Produced by Heidi Pett

Brother

One of the biggest, strangest things about ‘what might have beens’ is the ways they could change not only the course of our lives, and what happened, but our identities. Things that happen or don’t happen ripple through us and form the people we become.

Erin's been wondering for a while what might have been if something in her family had happened very differently

Produced by Erin Rosenberg

Executive Producers: Heidi Pett

State Coordinators: Bethany Atkinson-Quinton and Bec Fary

Presenters: Pip Rasmussen and Michael Brydon

Image Credit: Google Maps

We’re hitting snooze, closing our eyes, and drifting back to sleep with Bec Fary. She's the host and producer of SleepTalker, the podcast about sleep, dreams, nightmares and what happens in your head after dark.

In this special collaboration with All The Best, Bec follows three dreamers into the night to find out how their dreams influenced their waking lives.

 

Creative Freedom

“You’re almost given creative freedom in taking the fragments of your dream that you can remember and trying to churn them out into something that’s more cohesive. So you’re making these dramaturgical creative decisions about your dream.”

Declan Mulcahy, director of ____day Night’s Dream, collaborated with seven performers to adapt their dreams for the stage.

Music: ‘Drift’ by Charlie Salas-Humara, ‘Dream 5’ by Tonality Star and ‘Can’t Keep My Eyes Open’ by The Paperheads

Mind’s Eye

Zed’s skin is covered in ink. His arms, hands, back, stomach, legs, and even his face, are tattooed. An ornate, scripted word curves above Zed’s right eye. It might even be the first thing you notice about him. Turns out, it came to him in a dream.

Music: ‘This Is Where We Sleep’ by Brokeback and ‘Kaleidoscope Eyes’ by Noctambulo

Divine Inspiration

For Melbourne musician James Collopy, the unconscious hours of sleep can also be when creativity strikes. Here, he takes us on a musical journey through his dreaming mind.

Original music written and performed by James Collopy.

 

For more SleepTalker, head to www.sleeptalkerpodcast.com

 

Episode Producer: Bec Fary

Executive Producer: Heidi Pett

Presenters: Michael Brydon, Pip Rassmussen

Final song: ‘Mr Sandman’ by the Chordettes

Photo from the production of '____day Night's Dream'

"You get every kind of story from every kind of woman.  Maybe it's just taking the bra off, all the secrets come out."

We get a little bit intimate and talk intimate apparel. Bras to be exact. It’s about more than making your boobs look great, for so many women it’s wrapped up in our ideas of femininity, identity and also insecurity. Producers Hannah Reich and Elizabeth Kulas find that there are tears and smiles, sometimes breast milk and often something else very special in the fitting room.

Producers: Hannah Reich and Elizabeth Kulas

Music specially composed by Briana Cowlishaw (and one song by Podington Bear)

Sound Engineering by Calum Wakeling and Ariel Gross

Image by Nik Sandbridge

Listen closely because this week on All The Best we're weaving our way in and out of the spaces between words and examining the meaning that’s hidden in silence. Think about how much we say without our words. What if you didn’t have words to communicate? What if we just choose not to speak? How would this change the way we interact with one another? What are we saying to each other with our touch, with our posture, with the amount of space we leave between each other when we sit next to one another, in our expression and in our silence?

Silent Love

Told by Monique Henry

Force Doesn't Make Sense

Told by Jess Bell

Big Brother (Vipassana)

Told by Holly Masson

Produced by Bethany Atkinson-Quinton

Supervising Producer: Bec Fary

Episode Producer: Bethany Atkinson-Quinton

Supervising production from Jess O'Callaghan and Bec Fary, and transcription by Nabila Petrucci and Felicity Powell

Executive Producer: Heidi Pett

Presenters: Pip Rasmussen and Michael Brydon

Music Credits:

The Books-PS 

Hannah Cameron- You Forgot

Alexander W Simms- Out In The Cold

Carlos Ramirez- Horizon

Bad Bats- Heterotropic (Where We Used To Belong)

People who knock on your door asking you to change your religion, or to believe in the impending apocalypse. Infomercials. Pick up lines. Detox diets, click bait and pop up ads. There are things that people try again and again that you think would never work but they must sometimes, or surely people wouldn't bother. Today on All The Best we're asking: Does That Ever Work For You?

Takedown

David Blumenstein is a Melbourne based cartoonist. On November 6 last year, he went down to St Kilda Pier to wait for Julien Blanc to arrive. Julien's an American pro pick up artist and, when he tried to run workshops in Australia became the target of one of the most successful anti-PUA campaigns ever, collected around the hashtag #takedownjulienblanc. So successful that venue cancelled on him in the face of the outrage, and then he tried to hold the workshop on a boat. David sits down with our EP Heidi Pett to talk about his evening on a pier with pick up artists and protesters. You can get the comic book here

Produced by Heidi Pett

Mate

What does it mean when somebody you wanna date calls you mate? This story is from our mates (who we also probably wanna date) over at Private Parts, a brand new audio art project by Irit Pollak and Elin Andersson. They call it a collective memory bank that explores identity and perception from a gender perspective, and you can find them at partlyprivate.com and in iTunes. Go on.

Produced by Irit Pollak, Elin Andersson and Izzy Roberts-Orr

Music by The Twerps

The Dog Ate My Homework

There’s a program called Writing Workshop here in Sydney - they do workshops, on writing, for kids in school. It’s run by a guy called Bernard and  he's got this great thing where if the kids miss a class, they have to write this totally outlandish excuse letter, telling the story of why they couldn’t make it. It probably works better than “the dog ate my homework”. We got them to come into the studio one Sunday and record them for us.

Thanks to all the kids who took part, Amy, age 12, Belle, age 16, Julia, age 18, Annalise, age 10

Produced by Zacha, age 38 & Lily, age 24

I have a big mission coming in two days and they want to go to Za'atari and I said "If you want to go to Za'atari I will take you to the Dead Sea, and I will take a photo of you at the Dead Sea, because you are coming for tourism. Everybody that needs to go to Za'atari from the humanitarian community and the donor community has been there already."

This week on All The Best we're staying in the Jordanian capital, Amman.  While Za'atari, the huge camp in the north of the country that was at one stage home to more than 150 000 refugees - making it the fourth largest city in the country - receives the majority of media and donor attention, most Syrian refugees live in the capital. They're struggling to work and live in a city where they are largely unsupported and often undocumented. With few prospects of going home, or limited possibilities of moving forward, they wait.

Domenique Sherab brings you the stories of Mohammad, Abeer, and Bu.

Producer: Domenique Sherab

Supervising producer: Heidi Pett

Music: Bu Kolthum, Nassif Shamma, and The Partysquad & Boaz van de Beatz

Translation: Sanabel Yousef and Eman Alajaj, voiced by Kate Montague

Image: Domenique Sherab

Is there a place you've always wanted to go? Something that would be more than a holiday - a journey that you didn’t take to relax, but really to learn something from the way your feet hit the ground, to feel some sort of change at the end?

Modern life is full of weird, secular pilgrimages and today's episode of full of those stories.

Trailwalker

A few years ago, Alex Penman completed the infamous 100m Oxfam Trailwalker challenge. He says it's the most painful thing he's ever done, and for some reason he's training to do it again. Come along as he does it all again with a small team, and a recorder.

Produced by Alex Penman with Supervising Producer Bec Fary

Camino Del Santiago

The Camino de Santiago has traditionally been a catholic pilgrimage that intersects with pilgrimage paths all over Europe, until it ends in the Spanish city of Santiago. Starting from the French Pyrenees, Alice Chipkin walked nearly nine hundred kilometres over forty three days on an unplanned pilgrimage through Spain.

Produced by Emma Jensen

Music: Johnny’s Odyssey by Mac DeMarco