In the early 90s, when Meshell Ndegeocello released Plantation Lullabies, her first album, she helped to usher in the era of neo-soul. Her debut inspired a slew of artists such as Erykah Badu, D’Angelo, and Lauryn Hill. On later albums, Ndegeocello went on to experiment with silky jazz ballads, staccato rapping, quiet meditations—all of it led by the fat, undeniable groove of her bass playing. But even as she began to work with the energy of rock and the introspection of folk, her sound remained steeped in soul.

This week, we hear about Ndegeocello’s most recent project, a theatrical work called Can I Get a Witness: The Gospel of James Baldwin. In the last few years, there’s been a resurgence of interest in Baldwin, who died in 1987. Baldwin has emerged as an icon for a new generation of literary essayists—figures like Jesmyn Ward, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah—whose writing carries forward the power and precision in Baldwin’s work, addressing the African-American experience in a range of registers, moving from journalism to memoir to sermon to polemic to fine-grained, fiercely argued sociological and psychological analysis.

Meshell Ndegeocello’s adoration of Baldwin is secular, despite its many religious trappings. Ndegeocello has sanctified James Baldwin for his intellectual curiosity, for the way his work leads its listeners and readers to enlightenment through argument, information, and analysis, rather than faith and mysticism. It’s an immersive performance, somewhere between an improvisational concert, a dynamic church service, a rowdy, communal literary reading, and an exuberant celebration of a masterful writer.

This week you’ll also hear fiction from Ben Greenman. Ben has collaborated on books with Questlove and George Clinton and is the author most recently of Don Quixotic, a darkly comic investigation of the internal workings on the mind of our forty-fifth president. His story is performed here by actor Hank Harris, who has recently appeared on Twin Peaks and The Man in the High Castle.

This week, we’re sharing a highly subjective journey through one narrow, eccentric, corridor of radio advertising, as heard through the ears of one man. His name is Clive Desmond. Clive is a radio advertising producer, writer, and composer. He’s been doing it for more than thirty years, and he’s won some of the industry’s top awards. Through those years he’s been sort of a zelig figure: you can find his face somewhere in the margins of every one of the medium’s key aesthetic revolutions. He’s rescued beautiful forgotten nuggets of radio history, and he’s delicately arranged them into a glittering associative chain—a constellation of jingles and spots that somehow all add up, to a life: The life of Clive Desmond as heard through the radio. 

Listen below to a special bonus playlist of some of the finest radio-advertising nuggets Clive assembled:

In this episode, you’ll also hear Josh Wilker read his review of our program. “A man claiming to be from The Organist came to the parking lot gate out back. He said he needed access to the building’s electricity meter. We looked at one another through the bars.†Josh Wilker is the author of the pop-culture memoirs Cardboard Gods, Benchwarmer, and The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training. He lives in Chicago.

You can also check out our episode on Mal Sharpe, a man who was among the first wave of fake newsmen, paving the way from everyone from Borat to Colbert. In this week’s episode, Clive Desmond cites Mal as one of the originators of the “man on the street†radio commercial. Special thanks to Doug Thompson, Dan Aron, Nick Ream and Jennifer Sharper.

All incidental music courtesy of the wonderful artists listed below from Free Music Archive FMA.org

Podington Bear, “Three Colors,†“Light Touch,†“Keep Dancing,†“Clouds Pass Softly Deuxâ€

Lee Rosevere, “Let's Start At The Beginning,†“Making A Change Blue Dot Sessions, “Diatom,†“The Zeppelinâ€

Anamorphic Orchestra, “Machine Elvesâ€

Chris Zabriskie , "Another Version of You"

This week, we pull out the stops and go full-Organist with an episode about Ákos Rózmann, an organist serving a Catholic church in Stockholm who played hymns during the day and by night invented unearthly electronic music in the recording studio he’d built in the church basement (where he often slept). It was there that he composed his roiling experimental six-hour-long composition 12 Stations—a sonic journey from hell to heaven, which emerged from the personal trauma of his childhood in Nazi-occupied Hungary and then his father’s death in a Communist-era concentration camp. Stephen O’Malley, the composer and guitarist behind Sunn O))) and other doom-metal projects has recently reissued Rózmann’s compositions on his record label Ideologic Organ.

  Ákos Rózmann

This episode also features Jordan Jacks’s organophilic flash fiction: “The organist at my parents’ church had severe arthritis, and as a child my job was to flip pages for her. Her hands were so stiff that I also had to pull the stops: clarion, chimney flute, vox humana. Occasionally, when her ankles were bad, I also sat under the bench and pressed the keys of the pedalboard with my hands, waiting to hear the organist whisper the note down to me.”

Produced by Thomas Henley Image credit: Courtesy of Ideologic Organ

As an artist, Martine Syms says she’s interested in how her experience—in particular, her experience as a young black woman—gets shaped and determined by various forms of media—especially digital media. She’s interested in the power of that media—not just the obvious power of those who produce it, but the ways in which reading and consuming can also be acts of power.

One of Syms’s best-known projects is a critique of Afrofuturism, the artistic movement that explores and imagines the intersections between black culture and technology, typified by writers like Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany or musicians like Sun Ra or Janelle Monáe. Syms’s work is preoccupied with the connections between media, technology, and black culture, but she rejects the afrofuturist mythology that imagines technology as a radical liberating funk-inflected fantasy. Syms is an afrofuturist, but, in her words, a mundane one. For her, the stakes are too high for an art that dwells in fantasy or the “harmless fun” of funky space aliens. The imaginative work of Afrofuturism takes the form of art that, for all its futurism and digitality, remains focused on our world, however upsetting, unjust, and mundane it may be.

For the Organist, Syms spoke with our contributing editor, Niela Orr, about Syms’s life and approach to art, and the new languages she invents for herself.

In this episode, we also travel with Carmen Maria Machado to an Iowa gas station, where we find a dusty Subaru, a herd of cat-eyed children, and air that smells like diesel and manure and, inexplicably, limes. Carmen’s book Her Body and Other Parties was recently long-listed for the National Book Award. Her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, and elsewhere.

Produced by Niela Orr and Jenny Ament Image by Martine Syms, courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art.

Warm yourself beneath an underpass of the information superhighway! Brian McMullen reads all one thousand of his epic catalog of unclaimed URLs in this special appendix to our recent episode, magnificentwebsite.com, which explored the disassembly of one’s public persona and internet-induced bewilderment.

Brian has worked as an editor, art director, and designer for McSweeney’s, BOMB, Grantland, Cabinet, and Lucky Peach. With his wife Katie, he operates a small clothing company called Pantalaine, specializing in clothes made to be worn by two or more people at the same time.

Brian is publishing a special printed zine edition of Still Not Dotcoms to coincide with the release of this episode of the Organist. And he’d like to make this print edition freely available to any Organist listener who emails him at brianmcmullen at hotmail.com and mentions the Organist.

Has the internet documented everything? This week we explore its lacunae and unmoderated chat rooms and the ways we might slip away from the public identities we create online and in the media.

Joshua Cohen, author of Moving Kings and Book of Numbers, writes a novel live online, each word as he types it visible to the spectators of a raucous unmoderated chatroom funneling Reddit-grade hate speech into the margins of the author’s screen as he types, completing the novel in just five days.

MF Doom, who raps while wearing a steel gladiator mask, began sending other rappers—known as Doomposters, or MF Dupes—to headline his own shows. We investigate MF Doom’s slippery approach to identity and its relation to black performance art in conjunction with the Believer magazine’s return to the newsstands.

“My idea of advanced technology is a toilet seat whose trajectory from up to down takes so long to complete, I can pluck my unibrow while waiting for it to happen.” Zoe Lister-Jones, writer, director, and star of the new film Band Aid performs short fiction from novelist Fiona Maazel, explores the nascent form of the podcast from a 4 am toilet seat in a retirement home with stops along the way for eating disorders, evasive children, and the sinking feeling of disappearing from reality.

Throughout this week’s episode you’ll hear a catalog of unclaimed URLs from artist and writer Brian McMullen. “Kittenlawyer.com, specialgrandson.com, coolgrandson.com, supergrandson.com, bestgrandsonever.com, cocainegalaxy.com, cocaineuniverse.com, cocainery.com, badassperson.com, decentemployer.com, decentemployee.com, splendidsex.com, sexaintbad.com, abolishsex.com…”

Caveh Zahedi conflates reality TV, experimental documentary, and discomfort comedy in unsettling high-stakes films about his own life. In each episode of his TV project The Show about the Show, the actors and crew recreate the conflicts, interpersonal dramas, and unwittingly shared secrets that occurred during the filming of the previous episode. Each level takes us further behind the performance, landing the viewer deep inside the eccentric mind of Caveh himself. With an oddly life-affirming honesty, his work violates ethical boundaries and triggers the unraveling of his marriage. Is it worth losing someone you love to make the art you believe in? When the Organist sends producer Rachel James to document the production of his TV show, she too becomes drawn into Caveh’s inescapable vortex of metanarrative.

Produced by Rachel James and Mickey Capper

Note: this episode contains salty and/or strong language. Listener discretion is advised.

Anne Thompson rented a billboard along Interstate 70 in Missouri to put up an artwork that says “Keep Abortion Legal.” Anne runs the I-70 Sign Show, a project that, since 2014, has displayed the work of artists including Ed Ruscha, Marilyn Minter, and Mickalene Thomas along a stretch of highway that runs across the state of Missouri. Though Anne wasn’t initially interested in addressing politics through the project, all of that changed after the election. The I-70 Sign Show’s billboards often collide with their setting in unexpected ways, and it’s not uncommon for billboards to be defaced. Will the “Keep Abortion Legal” billboard, originally designed by artist Aleksandra Mir, be riddled with bullets by the time it’s replaced by a discount boots sign?

Also, we occasionally get some complaints about our show, like this one which was recently posted on our Apple Podcasts page from J. Robert Lennon. Lennon is the author of two story collections and eight novels, including Mailman, Familiar, and Broken River. On this episode, he reads his review.

Below you’ll find a slideshow of billboards from Anne Thompson’s I-70 Sign Show project. We’ve also included a bunch of other non-art billboards, Anne Thompson’s favorites from along I-70.

Produced by Bram Sable-Smith.

Aleksandra Mir, "Keep Abortion Legal," June-July 2017 View of installation at I-70 West mile 101, near Boonville (Credit: Matt Rahner for the I-70 Sign Show)

Commercial billboard, I-70, Missouri.

Jeff Gibson, "Armagarden," 2015  On main billboard, in Hatton, Missouri, December 2015–February 2016 (courtesy of Anne Thompson / I-70 Sign Show)

Commercial billboard, I-70, Missouri.

Karl Haendel, "Plow Pose," 2015On main billboard March–May 2015 (courtesy of Anne Thompson / I-70 Sign Show)

Commercial billboard, I-70, Missouri.

Visit I-70 Sign Show’s website to see art billboards from Marilyn Minter, Ed Ruscha, Ryan McGinness, and others.

This week we talk to two artists who see themselves as detectives. Trevor Paglen has designed sculptures for the Fukushima Exclusion Zone, as well as art that’s been launched into geostationary orbit. His photographs of secret military bases (taken at long range, using equipment made for astronomers) appeared in the Academy Award–winning documentary Citizenfour. We spoke with him about how to care for one’s personal digital hygiene in the age of surveillance.

To document torture, mass executions, and human-rights abuses at Saydnaya Prison in Syria, Amnesty International enlisted the help of sound artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan. This week we’re presenting Abu Hamdan’s sound installation Saydnaya (The Missing 19DB)—that’s “DB” as in decibels, the standard measure for the volume of sound. It offers an uncompromising depiction of Saydnaya, a notorious military prison in Syria, believed to be the site of up to fifty hangings each day. It’s a compound in the mountains just north of Damascus holding up to twenty thousand people in conditions of enforced silence. Abu Hamdan made the piece through interviews conducted in Istanbul with five survivors from the prison.

This episode also features a luminous and digressive review of the Organist, ripped from the heaps of listener commentary on our Apple Podcasts page, by the writer Vu Tran—no stranger to art as detective work himself. His work has been anthologized in Best American Mystery Stories, and his novel Dragonfish adapts and carries forward the tradition of writers like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. In his reflections on this podcast, Vu finds Melville's Secret Sharer in the woods of Vermont.

To learn more about conditions in Saydnaya Prison, visit Amnesty International’s interactive digital model, as reconstructed from interviews by Lawrence Abu Hamdan and Forensic Architecture.

Produced by Ross Simonini

Featured photo of Drone Vision courtesy of Trevor Paglen

Horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, best known for Cthulhu, an octopus-faced cosmic entity, has long inspired obsessive fandom and his short stories, in the hundred years since they were first published, have influenced a wide range of figures, including William Burroughs, Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, the makers of the Alien movies and the game Dungeons & Dragons, to name but a few. In Lovecraft’s cosmology, the human mind is incapable of comprehending the full psychic horror of reality and either must take refuge on a placid island of ignorance or be swept up in the black seas of infinity. Paul La Farge’s new novel, The Night Ocean, traces Lovecraft’s unusual friendship with a 16-year-old fan: the poet Robert Barlow, who Lovecraft followed to Florida, where they collaborated on a single story, the last work of fiction that either of them wrote before Lovecraft’s death and Barlow’s own tragic end.

In this episode, we also ask you to take the hand of “The Oldest Person in Town,” as—he, she, they—die and die and die again. Edgar Oliver, beloved for his monologues on The Moth Podcast, performs this short fiction from Kevin Moffett.

In our final segment, Yuri Herrera, author most recently of Kingdom Cons, and Lisa Dillman, translator of his novels, delve into noir in their collaborative meta-review of our show.

The excerpts from Lovecraft’s stories in this episode were performed by Omar Metwally, whose voice you may recognize from his television roles in Mr. Robot and The Affair.

Produced by Matt Frassica.