Phantom Power

Today, we look at some of the hidden labor that creates the ubiquitous music that we hear all around us.

Today we talk to Nessa Johnston and Jamie Sexton, co-editors (with Elodie A. Roy) of Anonymous Sounds, Library Music and Screen Cultures in the 1960s and 1970s. It's the first scholarly book that takes a comprehensive look at the early off-the-shelf music industry that soundtracked TV, movies, radio, and commercials and it argues that these anonymous individuals had a major collective impact on the music of the era.

This show is part of a series of occasional episodes and newsletters about the roles that music and sound play in public space.

Nessa Johnston is lecturer in screen studies and digital media at the University of Liverpool.

Jamie Sexton is associate professor of film and television studies at North University.

If you'd like to hear the full version of our conversation, including their reading and listening recommendations, you can become a member at http://mackhagood.com.

Cited Media:

Articles / Essays:

Anahid Kassabian - "Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Distributed Subjectivity" (2013)

Ryan Bradley - "It’s the Music You Hear All Day, Without Ever Noticing" (New York Times Magazine, 2026)

Philip Tagg - writings on library/functional music

Books:

Nessa Johnston, Jamie Sexton & Elodie A. Roy - Anonymous Sounds: Library Music and Screen Cultures in the 1960s and 1970s (2024)

David Hollander - Unusual Sounds: The Hidden History of Library Music (2018)

Simon Reynolds - Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past (2011)

Films / Documentaries:

The Library Music Film (2018)

Music:

Luciano Michelini - Frolic (1974)

John Pearson - Heavy Action (1974)

Barry 7 (of Add N to (x)) - Connectors series

Luke Vibert - Nuggets

Podcasts:

Phantom Power - The Lost Sounds of Silent Cinema: Vaudeville, Magic Lanterns, and Movie Palaces w/ Rick Altman, and Eric Dienstfrey (2019)

Chapters:

0:00 Intro
0:49 Ubiquitous Music
4:27 Meet the Guests
5:01 What is Library Music
6:54 Early History
13:35 Taste & Anonymity
27:47 The '60s & '70s Boom
32:22 Name that Tune
38:24 Crate Diggers & Sampling
45:30 AI & the Future
49:51 Outro

Click here to read the full transcript

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the fall of 2001, an obscure experimental musician decided to revisit some analog tape loops he had made back in the early eighties. Inspired by the work of Steve Reich, Brian Eno, and Robert Fripp, William Basinski had created his own distinctive practice of taping easy listening music off the radio, cutting the tape into loops, roughly a foot long, and then slowing it way down.

The result transformed music into something profound as these brief loops of time became capacious ambient spaces. William Basinski's, eighties creations anticipated coming trends in loop based production, noise, ambient and slowed, and reverbed music, but very few people were paying attention at the time.

Then in the summer of 2001, Basinski decided to digitize some of his favorite loops from his 1980s archive, and that's when everything changed. As he played the old tapes back, the magnetic ferrite that had captured the music began flaking off the plastic backing of the tape. The very act of digitally preserving the tapes was also destroying them.

Basinski could hear the sound of decay, the death of an old medium captured by a new one. Grounded in decades of art practice, Basinski recognized what he had and he knew to stay out of the way, adding just a bit of reverb, but otherwise letting the tapes sing their swan song. The resulting tracks became known as The Disintegration Loops, and he finished them right as the events of September 11th unfolded.

From a rooftop in Brooklyn, he videotaped the smoking ruins of the Twin Towers, and then he synced the video to the music he had just made. The Disintegration Loops is regarded as one of the most important artworks associated with 9/11. It's part of the permanent collection of the national September 11th Memorial and Museum.

The record received glowing praise in The Wire and Pitchfork and Basinski became one of the most influential figures in ambient and experimental music. And now 25 years after the disintegration loops creation, William Basinski is on an American tour to mark the anniversary, and I'm thrilled to have him on the show today.

We talk about the tour, his sonic practice, his surprising childhood as what he calls a NASA brat. His background in classical jazz and rock music, our mutual love of shortwave radio, and even his amazing fashion sense.

Click here to find more information about William Basinski’s upcoming tour.

Cited Media:

Steve Reich - It's Gonna Rain (1965)

Steve Reich - Music for 18 Musicians (1978)

William Basinski - Shortwavemusic (1980s)

William Basinski - Water Music (self-released)

William Basinski - The Disintegration Loops (2002–2003)

William Basinski - September 23rd (reissued ~2024)

William S. Burroughs - Naked Lunch (1959)

Pitchfork - Disintegration Loops review by Mark Richardson

Chapters:

0:42 Intro & Background
4:28 The Tour
6:02 NASA Brat
11:42 Classical Training
12:36 Music School & Influences
15:14 San Francisco Years
26:36 The Disintegration Loops
29:29 Release & Reception
34:30 Shortwave Radio
37:12 Fashion & Style
39:30 Outro

Click here to read the full transcript

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Do fish have ears? What is the nature of underwater hearing and how does it differ from hearing in the air? If humans are the evolutionary descendants of ocean creatures, do we retain any fishy traces in the way we hear the world? And what about all the noise we humans make in our oceans? If we want to save the planet, do we need to learn to listen like the fishes once again? Today we explore these questions with Marine biologist and bioacoustics expert Dr. Sophie Nedelec.

Nedelec has a PhD in bioacoustics and behavioral ecology from the University of Bristol. She is a Dorothy Hodgkin Fellow of the Royal Society and he's a senior research fellow at the University of Exeter. She researches underwater sound, sensory ecology, and human’s sonic impacts on the environment and sustainability.

Speaking of oceans, today marks a bit of a sea change here at Phantom Power: the addition of occasional “SOS” episodes on the Science of Sound with co-host Dr. Nathan Morehouse. Nate's an Associate Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of Cincinnati, where he also serves as the Director of the Institute for Research in Sensing (IRiS), an interdisciplinary research institute focused on sensing, perception, and sensor technology development through adventurous integration of insights from the sciences, engineering, humanities, and arts.

Cited Media:

Sophie L. Nedelec et al. - "Particle Motion: The Missing Link in Underwater Acoustic Ecology" (2016)

Sophie L. Nedelec et al. - Motorboat noise impacts parental behaviour and offspring survival in a reef fish (2017)

Sophie L. Nedelec et al. - Hormonal and behavioural effects of motorboat noise on wild coral reef fish (2020)

Sophie L. Nedelec et al. - Soundscapes and living communities in coral reefs: temporal and spatial variation (2015)

Machine Listening (Sean Dockery, James Parker, Joel Stern) - Environments 12 (2023)

Chapters:

0:00 Intro
0:52 Meet the Guests
1:42 Introducing SOS Episodes
4:25 Do Fish Have Ears?
9:29 The Otolith Explained
12:44 The Lateral Line
26:29 Particle Motion: The Missing Link
34:57 Protecting Marine Life
36:58 Boat Speed & Noise
45:06 Reef Restoration with Sound
49:23 Noise Cancellation Underwater
54:52 Outro

Click here to read the full transcript

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Why does a sixty-year-old media theory resurface in the media every few years, while journalists ignore the great communication scholarship that has emerged in the meantime? More importantly, what effects does antiquated thinking have on the public understanding of our current digital discontent? In this episode, Cameron Naylor interviews our usual host, Mack Hagood, about his recent newsletter, “Oral Residue: A Zombie Media Theory Rises Again.” Marshall McLuhan and Walter J. Ong believed that all of human history is dividable into three eras: the oral, the literate, and the electronic. However, this kind of “Great Divide” thinking has long been criticized by scholars who study oral communication, literacy, media, and sound. In this episode we talk about the good, bad, and ugly of McLuhan and Ong’s long legacy.

Cited Media:

Marshall McLuhan - Understanding Media (1964)

Walter J. Ong - Orality and Literacy (1982)

Raymond Williams - Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974)

Derek Thompson - Plain English (podcast episode with Joe Weisenthal) (2026)

Jonathan Sterne - The Audible Past

Harold Innis - works on communication theory

Eric Havelock - works on orality and literacy

Gerard Manley Hopkins - Poetry

Homer - The Iliad and The Odyssey (8th century BCE)

Chapters:

0:00 Introduction

0:44 Episode Overview

3:20 Introducing Mack Hagood

4:14 First Encounter with Ong

8:52 Discovering McLuhan

17:25 Why McLuhan Keeps Returning

25:49 Critiques of the Great Divide

33:36 The Ear as a Source of Terror

37:40 Closing Thoughts

38:33 Outro

Click here for the full transcript.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Creativity doesn’t come out of thin air–it evolves in relation to the communities around us and the tools available to us. Some of the most common forms of everyday creative works–memes, podcasts, vertical videos–barely existed a couple of decades ago. And obviously, we can’t ignore the changing economics of creative industries, which wield an outsized influence over what kind of work gets made.

Today host Mack Hagood talks to legendary podcast executive Julie Shapiro’s about what it means to be creative in the year 2026, particularly from an audio perspective. Given their shared history in 20th century indie music scenes, they also talk about the ways that indie music and fan culture shaped them–and how practices like zine making shaped the internet as we know it.

But does the current shape of the internet promote good creative work and a fulfilling life? In this frank conversation, Mack and Julie discuss the challenges of making a living as a creative and doing fulfilling work when the digital system does its best to prevent those things.

In our members-only version of the podcast, Mack and Julie discuss the turn to video podcasting and in  the What's Good segment, Julie suggests some incredible podcasts to listen to, as well as things to do and to read.

Cited Media:

Nancy Baym - Playing to the Crowd: Musicians, Audiences, and the Intimate Work of Connection (2018)

Nigel Poor & Earlonne Woods - Ear Hustle (Radiotopia/PRX)

Nathan Heller - The Battle for Attention: How do we hold on to what matters in a distracted age? (2024)
Tumi Magnússon - Voyage There and Back (2015)

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction

03:27 Mardi Gras and Mobile Sound

13:47 Indie Music Origins

26:15 DIY Ethics and Community

30:32 Being Broke vs Career Pressure

44:37 How DIY Became the Internet

57:47 Returning to Creative Roots

01:05:12 The Podcast Industry Crisis

01:22:32 Information vs Experience

01:31:21 Making Work in This Moment

Click here to read the full transcript

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we go on a listening tour with audio legend Julie Shapiro, who has helped define what radio and podcasts could be over the past 25-plus years. Shapiro co-founded the Third Coast International Audio Festival, one of the most prestigious and influential awards in audio. She was a longtime executive at PRX Radiotopia, home of shows like Song Exploder, Kitchen Sisters Present and Everything is Alive. She helped launch and executive produced narrative podcasts such as Ear Hustle, first recorded inside San Quentin State Prison. Her shows have won Webby awards and Signal awards and been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

In this episode, host Mack Hagood plays stellar moments from Julie’s long history in audio and asks her to elaborate on how they were made and what made them great. They also discuss the current industry retrenchment, where budgets are shrinking and low-ambition video chat shows are redefining the very meaning of the word podcast. It’s an illuminating conversation that will appeal to fans and have audio producers taking notes.

Finally, Julie discusses her new project with partner John DeLore, Audio Flux—a platform and podcast for short audio pieces that is inspiring fantastic new works from around the world. The Audio Flux Podcast was just named by The New Yorker as one of the top 10 podcasts of 2025. In this episode Julie announces a call for new works that Phantom Power listeners might want to respond to!

Audio Showcase:

Katie Mingle - The Dead Can't Do You Nothin' (Third Coast Audio Festival)

Owen Ever & Laine Kaplan-Levenson - A Field Guide to Gay Animals (Canadaland)

Nigel Poor & Earlonne Woods - Ear Hustle (Radiotopia/PRX)

Vivien Schütz & Laura Rojas Aponte - Red Card (AudioFlux)

Julie Shapiro & John DeLore - AudioFlux

Radio Shows/Podcasts:

Hrishikesh Hirway - Song Exploder (Radiotopia)

The Kitchen Sisters - The Kitchen Sisters Present (Radiotopia)

Ian Chillag - Everything is Alive (Radiotopia)

Roman Mars - 99% Invisible (Radiotopia)

Sarah Koenig - Serial (Serial Productions)

Ira Glass - This American Life (WBEZ/PRX)

Jad Abumrad & Robert Krulwich - Radiolab (WNYC)

Gwen Macsai - Re:sound (Third Coast/WBEZ)

Signal Hill (Audio Magazine)

Organizations/Festivals:

Third Coast International Audio Festival

PRX Radiotopia

Radio Workshop

Chapters:

0:00 Introduction

0:21 Julie Shapiro Introduction

5:44 Listening Habits

8:26 Katie Mingle: The Dead Can't Do You Nothin'

9:52 Third Coast Audio Festival

16:47 A Field Guide to Gay Animals

24:38 Ear Hustle Ep. 7 Unwritten. 9:47-11:07

32:17 Red Card by Vivien Schütz and Laura Rojas Aponte (AudioFlux)

36:28 Audio Flux Circuit Seven - Trash or Treasure

44:50 Closing Remarks

Click here to read the full transcript

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The year is off to a very disturbing start thanks to ICE’s violent paramilitary incursion in Minneapolis-St. Paul. Minnesota citizens have responded with mass protests and direct action, much of it sonic in nature—with the sound of whistles alerting neighbors and making life harder on ICE. 

This episode, we speak with an expert on noise, power, and protest who also happens to live and teach in Minneapolis: Gabriel Saloman Mindel. Gabriel is one half of the Noise band Yellow Swans. Last month, we discussed the aesthetics and politics of noise music.

This month, Gabriel discusses settler-colonial ways of treating the land, humans, and the soundscape in service of capital and political power, as well as noise, protest, and political power in the troubling context of current events. 

This episode features an interview we did in November and excepts from a follow-up in December, after the ICE incursion began. If you’d like to hear the full conversation about Minneapolis, we’ll be dropping it in our members feed. (If finances are an issue, just drop us a line an we’ll get you access.)

Gabriel has an MFA from Simon Fraser University and a PhD in the History of Consciousness from UC, Santa Cruz. He teaches at. Learn about upcoming Yellow Swans shows on their Instagram.

Also mentioned: Mack’s launched a new newsletter series, "What has the digital done to our listening?"

Media Cited

Hildegard Westerkamp - Kits Beach Soundwalk (1989)

Prince - 1999 (Official Music Video)

Raven Chacon - Voiceless Mass (2021)

Hildegard Westerkamp - "The New Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver: An Acoustic Dump"

Gabriel Mindel - "Sovereignty, Sonic Limits Music and Spectacle at the Border" in Studies in Social Justice (2025)

Chapters:

01:40 Guest Introduction: Gabriel Saloman Mindel

05:16 Gabriel's Academic Journey

09:36 Settler Colonialism and Soundscapes

26:21 Silence and Indigenous Perspectives

27:34 Raven Chacon's Voiceless Mass

30:39 Prince and the End of the World

39:09 Operation Metro Surge

43:42 Direct Action and Protest

Click here to read the full transcript

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Gabriel Saloman Mindel is a lot more than one half of the United States best known noise bands. He's also an interdisciplinary artist and a scholar whose research studies the interplay between sound and power, as he theorizes how noise can push the limits of the body in struggles over space and political autonomy. 

Gabriel has an MFA from Simon Fraser University and a PhD in the History of Consciousness from UC Santa Cruz. He's also a longtime Phantom Power listener and supporter of the show. We first met a little over a year ago at the Unsound Festival in Poland, where Yellow Swans played a packed reunion show. It's been a lovely thing to get to know him--he's a gentle soul who  makes aggressive sounds tied to some serious ethical and political commitments. 

In today's interview, we talk about the history and music of Yellow Swans, the interplay between noise, ethics, aesthetics, and politics. Gabriel even breaks down how he and Pete produced the track we were just listening to. Even if you're not a fan of noise music, I think you're going to love this fascinating conversation. And next month, we'll play part two of the interview, in which Gabriel discusses his scholarship on the work of other artists, including Raven Chacon, Hildegard Westerkamp, and Prince. 

You can find Yellow Swans online at Bandcamp and Instagram.

They will be performing at GRM's annual Présences Électronique festival on Feb 13. In London, first at the Lexington on Feb 16 and then Corsica on Feb 18, and then finish at Bozar in Brussels.

Chapters:

0:00 Intro & Welcome

5:53 Gabriel Saloman Mindel

6:52 What is a Yellow Swans Show?

12:48 Early Influences & Discovering Noise

13:45 DIY, Punk, and the Noise Scene

21:57 Noise, Community, and Spirituality

22:45 Performance, Consent, and Audience Experience

24:00 Paradoxes: Noise, Calm, and Reception

29:17 Crafting the Sound: Gear & Process

41:43 Band Dynamics & Collaboration

45:07 Legacy, Recognition, and Touring

51:04 Art, Politics, and the Noise Scene

53:09 Fascism, Provocation, and Identity in Noise

59:44 Inclusivity and Change in the Scene

60:24 Outro: Thanks & What’s Next

Click here to read the full transcript.

⁠

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today host Mack Hagood is joined by three remarkable scholars whose work sits at the intersection of African music, technology, and culture.

Dr. Louise Meintjes is Marcello Lotti Professor at Duke University. She's a distinguished ethnomusicologist whose groundbreaking research on South African music has transformed how we understand the recording studio as a site of cultural negotiation and creative production.

Media anthropologist Dr. Reginold Royston is an Associate Professor jointly-appointed in the School of Information (formerly SLIS) and the Department of African Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He examines a range of African and African diasporic media and technology, from Black Atlantic audiobooks to African podcasting to viral dance videos emanating from Ghana and Chicago's footwork scene.

And Kingsley Okyere is graduate student at Penn whose work on African and Afro-diasporic musical circulation and genres is bringing fresh perspectives on the sounds shaping the continent today.

In this episode, we explore the evolution of Afrobeats and Amapiano, two genres that have captured global attention in recent years. We also discuss how technology and diaspora networks have shaped African popular music, examine questions of genre, identity, and global circulation, and consider the social and political contexts that inform music production and reception across the continent and beyond.

Chapters:

3:21 Meet the Guests: African Music Scholars

6:03 What Are Afrobeats and Amapiano?

7:56 Afrobeats vs. Afrobeat: History & Identity

11:49 Branding, World Music, and South African Context

14:29 Recording Studios as Sites of Negotiation

17:42 Digital Networks and Diaspora Influence

23:23 Listening Practices: Streaming, Social Media, and Algorithms

29:00 Dance, Timelines, and Global Rhythms

33:13 Economic Realities and Global Music Industry

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How did we humans become so dependent on white noise machines, noise-canceling headphones, lo-fi girl and other technologies that help us privatize and individualize our soundscape? An important character in that cultural history is Irv Teibel, whose environments series helped change how we listen. These records were the first to use recorded natural soundscapes as technologies to change how we feel and function. 

My guests this episode are Joel Stern and James Parker, two thirds of the art and research collective known as Machine Listening—a group that shares my fascination with Teibel. With their partner Sean Dockray, James and Joel have released a vinyl record called Environments 12: New Concepts in Acoustic Enrichment. This album reimagines Irv Teibel’s 1970s Environments albums—those “relaxation records” made for stressed-out people—as a set of soundscapes made for the stressed-out environment itself. 

The project mixes archival nature recordings, synthetic atmospheres, and AI-generated voices into strange new habitats. Narrators—some human, some machine—tell fables about seashores, reefs, and animal enclosures, where the line between the natural and the artificial dissolves. The result is a haunting, witty, and thought-provoking album that asks what it means to listen when both humans and environments are under pressure. 

Machine Listening’s art and research practice is deeply engaged with the politics of datasets, algorithmic systems, surveillance, and the shifting dynamics of power in “listening” technologies. Among other things, they interrogate how voice assistants, smart speakers, and algorithmic audio systems mediate — and often extract data from — human sound.  Their installations and performances have been shown in institutions worldwide, including the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw Museum of Modern Art, and at festivals like Unsound.  In short, Machine Listening blends creative and critical strategies to explore and expose the hidden infrastructures of acoustic power.

James Parker and Joel Stern are both based in Melbourne Australia, where Parker is Associate Professor at Melbourne Law School and Stern is Research Fellow at RMIT School of Media and Communication. In this conversation we go deep on environments, AI, and recent innovations that surveil and remediate the environment in order to save it--for example playing recordings of healthy ocean reefs to sick ones to improve their vitality. It's some pretty wild shit. 

As always, you can join to get the extra long version of this conversation, including our guests recommendations on things to read, listen and do. Just go to mackhagood.com to join. 

That's also where you should go to get our free monthly newsletter with all kinds of great links and resources for people obsessed with sound. We just dropped the first edition and I'm telling you, it's brimming with sonic content that I can't squeeze into the podcast.

Chapters:

0:00 The Origins of Environments: Irv Teibel’s Ocean Recording

7:14 Introducing Machine Listening: Art, Technology, and Sound

13:08 The Environments Series: Cultural Impact and Reception

18:58 Avant-Garde Meets Commerce: Teibel’s Methods and Influence

24:51 Bell Labs, IBM, and the Birth of Machine Listening

30:53 Simulation, Emulation, and the Legacy of Environments

36:53 Environments 12: Reimagining Soundscapes for the Environment

42:45 Technologies of the Self and Environmentality

47:55 Sound Design for Zoos: From Field Recordings to Animal Welfare

53:39 Closing Thoughts and Future Directions

For full transcript visit irv-teibels-environments-ai-audio-and-the-future-of-listening-w-machine-listening

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices