Never Records Podcasts

Beloved Never Records family,

I will not add another jeremiad about the state of the world to your bandwidth. Like you, we have suffered setbacks and inconveniences, austerity, and isolation. Like you, we are outraged by racial injustice and inequality and the divisiveness of our age. It is enough to stifle creative impulse, to find ourselves trapped in a feedback loop of negativity.

The truth is, aside from being unemployed, I feel immeasurably lucky. My son is a perpetual joy machine, my wife a constant source of humor and good nature. My family is healthy. I also have Never Records and its regenerative soundtrack. I have your sounds to bolster me when I falter.

It's been 10 years since this all began, 10 or so cities, and 1000's of artists. I never thought I'd be doing this for a decade, it seemed like a one-off art project, but I felt so inspired by you that now I think I'll do this for the rest of my life.

Send me your apocalypse anthems, your reflections on this now infamous time. It could be a song, a poem, or a sound. At the height of the pandemic the distant sounds of ambulances in New York was a constant reminder of the sick and the dead. I know many of you do not traffic in the didactic. I'm not asking for anything that you are not willing to give, but I am asking for a measure of what we are all going through. If its a cheery pop song so be it, but I ask you is this how you will mark this time 10 years from now? a hundred years from now? Your sounds are testimony. How will you testify?

Now I know many of you have songs recorded that you'd like on vinyl. This is not the time for duplication, this is the time for creation! Record on a cassette and send me the tape! Record with me live over the internet! If you don't have a way to record reach out to me and together we'll figure out a way! And of course if you are in New York come to my studio, my sanctuary, and we'll record and cut live!

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We’re nearing the end of the Brooklyn episodes. It’s not for lack of material, I have more tracks left to play, including not one, but two Christmas tracks which is a first for Never Records, but I’m going to need to step back from the show tofocus on the Newest iteration of Never Records which launches in a week. I’m going to cap the tenth anniversary of Never Records year with a special project called Never Records: Apocalypse Anthems. I’m asking participants from past Never Records around the world to write songs, poems, and send sounds that capture the zeitgeist of this moment in time. Etched sonically forever into vinyl, for both participants and posterity, these recordings will telegraph the sounds of our time into a future which seems so fragile and unsure. I’m hoping to share these recording with you early next year.

Back to todays episode. I want to build on last week’s poetry episode and play some BAM recordings that begin to blur the lines between poetry and theater.

As you’ve probably heard me state before Never Records is not about music. Sure music is often the currency of sound, but I’m much more interested in the fellowship of recording and the teaching of the transcendental science of record cutting. To this end, Never Records is really a scripted performance by me in which I lead participants on a guided meditation of sound.

Some of my favorite Never Records tracks aren’t songs: the architect Elvis Achepol in Kansas City giving directions to the prairie, the cosmologist Paul Malone giving a lecture about the electric universe in London, BJ Nilson’s piezo electric recording of the lathe cutting itself, the evening call to prayer recorded at the ruins of a citadel in the center of Amman to name a few.

Today we’re going to focus on poets and we’re going to begin with Brooklyn Poets.

When I recorded in the UK and Ireland I was really happy to discover veins of progressive rock in the geology of the contemporary music scenes in these regions. It’s as if the half-life of bands like Soft Machine and Can could still send Geiger counters flittering. I find prog rock fascinating from a lyrical stand-point. as if Tolkien, Kenneth Graham, and Lewis Carol formed a band. Existentially earnest songs about primrose heaths, fun fairs, and haughty hearths with some calico toadstools thrown in for good measure. It’s the literary influences that make progressive rock so meaty as if the music is composed like a well-crafted complex sentence. Songs are well wrought and travel well beyond straight rock’s limits.

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When someone signs up for a Never Records session they get a brief list of frequently asked questions. This document explains a bit about the project, lists available equipment, as well as session guidelines which include a 10-minute time limit for the performance to be recorded. When it comes to art rules are made to be broken, but for the most part I restrict the length of the recordings to be cut to vinyl to 10 minutes or less. It’s a formula that’s worked for over 500 recordings across three continents.

As you can imagine, participants approach this time limit in many different ways. Some record a 3-minute pop song and leave it at that, others try to sneak in a second song by adding a musical bridge between compositions(you can’t fool me), and others just ignore the time limit altogether which is quite rare.

We’re going to do something a little different on today’s episode and feature two tracks from Never Records BAM that are longer improvisations that I’m going to play back to back so we’ll get a nice long set of music. I’ll limit commentary to before and after. Both tracks are instrumentals one acoustic one electric and I think you’ll agree they sound amazing together.