Medium Rotation

A reading of “Little Girls,” Nikita Gale’s essay on Tina Turner, Phil Spector, and the prospect of Black performers being heard without being controlled. This bonus episode follows Gale’s conversation about Turner—and how the music industry determines whose voices are amplified and whose are silenced—in episode 6. The essay, published by Triple Canopy last year, is read by Kaneza Schaal.

“The sound of being together—or of being packed together, forced together.” Nikita Gale, an artist and the co-host of the podcast, speaks about Tina Turner, Phil Spector, and the prospect of being heard without being controlled. She tells the story of the genre-busting song that Turner and Spector, the infamous producer, recorded in 1966, “River Deep—Mountain High”: a commercial failure but a creative breakthrough for Turner, who had previously been defined as an R&B singer and dominated by her abusive husband and bandmate, Ike Turner. Gale talks about the song as a symbol for how the music industry determines whose voices are amplified and whose are silenced. She observes that the segregation of cities in midcentury America was echoed on the airwaves, and the definition of audiences via racial and demographic categories has been upheld by record labels, Spotify, and the Grammys.

“What happens when we all vibrate together?” Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, an artist and composer, speaks about bass as a way to repulse people or bring them together, cause aggravation or collective pleasure. He recounts moments in his life when bass, emanating from a parked car or carnival, has shaken his walls, tested his nerves, and made him feel connected to other people, whether or not he appreciates the music blasting from their subwoofers. Ranging from the soundtrack of his childhood in Baton Rouge to the sonic maelstrom of J’ouvert in Brooklyn, Toussaint-Baptiste describes bass as a means for marginalized people to make an impression on an insensitive world. He listens to chopped-and-screwed cumbia, Ariana Grande, laptop speakers, Nelly, the passage of bass through subway tunnels, and frequencies too low to hear.

“Liveness becomes a recording.” Tashi Wada, a composer and performer, presents music for a “high-resolution player piano” and reflects on technologies that claim to capture the souls of performers. In his composition, Wada asks how we discern between human expression and technical perfection, how we listen to virtuosos and machines. He speaks with the hosts, Nikita Gale and Alexander Provan, about the pandemic-era vogue for liveness at home, the displacement of pianists by piano rolls (or proprietary software), and the differences between people and marionettes.

“We are here, and the same rights accrue to us.” Derica Shields, a writer and researcher, advocates for listening to Black peoples’ accounts and analyses of their own lives. She speaks with the hosts, Nikita Gale and Alexander Provan, about her oral history of Black experiences of the welfare state, “A Heavy Nonpresence." Her work shows how, in Britain, liberal nostalgia for the so-called care of the state is premised on not listening to those who receive benefits—and how politicians and journalists enable Black people to be shamed for doing so by upholding the age-old distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor.

“They were smiling and dancing to not get killed.” Harmony Holiday, a writer, dancer, and archivist, reflects on the songs and silences of Black performers. She speaks with the hosts, Nikita Gale and Alexander Provan, about Black musicians whose songs and struggles reflect the ongoing trauma of the “African holocaust,” from Albert Ayler to Kanye West to Holiday's father, the soul singer Jimmy Holiday. They discuss the pressure on Black performers to cater to white audiences as well as the impulse to seek a form of expression (and of being) that is chosen and not imposed by force.

“We’re all here for the same reason.” The hosts of the podcast, Nikita Gale and Alexander Provan, ask who we are—and what we can do—as listeners, members of an audience, and bodies in concert (or in conflict). They introduce Medium Rotation by speaking about the revelation of arena concerts, the performance of listening by CEOs and self-help gurus, and how the demand to be heard manifests in protest and property violence.

A trailer for Medium Rotation by Alexander Provan, the editor of Triple Canopy and, along with Nikita Gale, host of the podcast. Why listen? That’s the question posed in the first season of the podcast, Omniaudience. The answer: we become who we are—and relate to one another as individuals and members of a body politic—through listening. But we live in a society that seems antithetical to listening, and set up to suppress the voices of those who have, historically, struggled to be heard. Omniaudience is an experiment in listening as well as an argument against the conflation of freedom and speech, an antidote to communication for the sake of outputting data and distraction.