Here There Be Dragons

After ten years of conducting interviews for Here There Be Dragons, there’s one question that Jess particularly loves to ask: “Where is the heart of the city for you?” Usually, we wait until the end of the season to reveal the many hearts that residents leave all over their city maps. But in Odes[s]a, these hearts seemed to coalesce in one neighborhood in particular, the City Center. So, this episode kicks off not only this season, but also a two-part exploration of Odes[s]a’s downtown with all its potentials and limitations.

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For our last prologue episode, we're thinking a little more about the sounds of Odes[s]a. When Jess first started interviewing Odes[s]a residents for the show, it became clear that we would need help defining a sound that is specific to the city. This season, Ivan, founder of the indie Odes[s]a based music label, система system, stepped into that role. Here, he talks a bit about the sounds that define his hometown.

Check out more of Ivan's work on his bandcamp: https://systemnapotvora.bandcamp.com

The whole team at HTBD has been working, at this point for years, on a new season about Odes[s]a, Ukraine. While we’re impatient to put out everything we’ve been preparing, we decided to take our time and frame what you will be hearing this season. A prologue if you will. For the next few weeks, we’ll be releasing these short casual clips that explain our approach (and how it changed) this season. Because of the nature of audio, it’s easy to think that the person in front of the microphone is going it alone. But HTBD is a pretty large lift made all the easier by Adriene, who has been the show’s sound designer since season 3 and is now the executive producer too. Adriene and Jess have worked together on projects for years but we rarely get to hear from her. So before we kick off this season, here is Adriene talking more about the sonic “identity” of HTBD.

The whole team at HTBD has been working, at this point for years, on a new season about Odes[s]a, Ukraine. While we’re impatient to put out everything we’ve been preparing, we decided to take our time and frame what you will be hearing this season. A prologue if you will. For the next few weeks, we’ll be releasing these short casual clips that explain our approach (and how it changed) this season. This clip addresses Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which completely upended life in Odes[s]a. While the war does not fundamentally shift residents’ long rooted relationships to their city, it does reshape their ambitions and fears for the future. It also had a huge impact on the way we were able to record the show.

The whole team at HTBD has been working, at this point for years, on a new season about Odes[s]a, Ukraine. While we’re impatient to put out everything we’ve been preparing, we decided to take our time and frame what you will be hearing this season. A prologue if you will. For the next few weeks, we’ll be releasing these short casual clips that explain our approach (and how it changed) this season. This clip talks about our approach to language this season, a subject that has gotten more and more tense in Odes[s]a since Russia’s invasion.

The whole team at HTBD has been working, at this point for years, on a new season about Odes[s]a, Ukraine. While we’re impatient to put out everything we’ve been preparing, we decided to take our time and frame what you will be hearing this season. A prologue if you will. For the next few weeks, we’ll be releasing these short casual clips that explain our approach (and how it changed) this season. This clip gets into how the sausage is made if you will. Essentially, how and why we work the way we work.

The whole team at HTBD has been working, at this point for years, on a new season about Odes[s]a, Ukraine. While we’re impatient to put out everything we’ve been preparing, we decided to take our time and frame what you will be hearing this season. A prologue if you will. For the next few weeks, we’ll be releasing these short casual clips that explain our approach (and how it changed) this season. This one is addressing a simple question that Jess got asked a lot. Why Odes[s]a????

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Website: www.htbdpodcast.com

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Social Media: @dragons_podcast

We have been beyond impatient to bring you this season of Here There Be Dragons, one of the most work and resource intensive seasons we’ve ever done. Finally it’s here! Thank you for all the support we have received and continue to receive to make this happen. We’re looking forward to getting this in your ears very soon.

Check out our:

Website: www.htbdpodcast.com

Newsletter: htbdpodcast.substack.com

Social Media: @dragons_podcast

As many of you know, in addition to hosting and producing Here There Be Dragons, I also teach architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design. And for the past year, I’ve been working on A Pause Is Not A Break. An exhibition for the architecture department about the intersection of sound and architectural practice. Learn more at https://www.htbdpodcast.com/apauseisnotabreak.

A PAUSE IS NOT A BREAK

In architecture, we the practitioners of the built environment, have turned over our mode of communication so entirely to visual mediums, that we have been accused on many occasions of being poor listeners, poor readers, and perhaps, at the base of it, poor perceivers. What does the axonometric, the plan, the section, the elevation, the detail, the model miss? What have we failed to render in our visual pursuits?

The medium of audio may seem like a privation, cutting us off from the images we use to make meaning but in sound there is a representation of liveliness that standard architectural drawings cannot always capture, and in many cases, actively avoid or sanitize. Unlike the eye, which has a natural defense against that which it does not wish to absorb, the ear has no such mechanism. It is difficult to close the ear without great effort. It requires instead a type of concentration that creates hierarchies of the sonic information that surrounds us. And so, sound becomes a ubiquitous medium––perhaps the most ubiquitous sense in space––taking on through its mundane repetitions a significant part of how we, the users of the built, make sense of space. How can we train the architect’s ear onto the issue of occupation, and so history, and so life? Perhaps the tools of repetition and invocation can remind us of what we know, what our minds have been storing all our lives.

Special thanks to Adriene Lilly, Mohammad Golabi, Amy Kulper, Katy Rogers, Karen Bell, Carlos Medellin, Aine Guiney, Alex Eckman-Lawn, Uthman Olowo, Alia Varawalla, and of course the Design Research Seed Fund.

Don’t be alarmed. We’re working on a few experiments in between seasons. This is an episode swap with the experimental Berlin-based cultural magazine Errant Journal. We’re swapping an interview they did with Brazilian practitioner Felipe Altenfelder about his project Mida Ninja. We start off with an interview with the magazine and podcast editor Irene de Craen. Irene will be reposting the Moving episode from the Stockholm season starting with a brief interview with me. Be sure to check that out along with other Errant Podcast episodes.

https://errantjournal.org