#Clockmaker podcast serial#
#Clockmaker podcast full#

Samson is calling me from her car, driving somewhere by herself, and she points out that solitude is the basic state of the podcast listener: by oneself, interstitial, and yet tethered by voices to an invisible and vast network of human experience. It has to be really boring.’” She’d take out an element and send it back, only to get another note: “More boring.” And again: “More boring than that.” “And were like ‘No, it can’t be a normal song.

“My first bunch of songs I sent in were… songs, ” Samson tells me. This notion of “the space” comes by way of JD Samson of Le Tigre, who recently wrote the season teaser for Radiotopia, the Public Radio Exchange’s podcast network. Its function is to create a space for the human voice, and for the silence of a voice that’s stopped speaking. There’s something fundamentally different about the music that’s written for radio, even by great pop writers whose work seems effortlessly catchy-primarily, it’s not supposed to be very catchy. And Daniel Hart, Helado Negro, Trey Pollard, and Matt McGinley, who contributed to the score for the recent blockbuster podcast S-Town, had 16 million people hear their music in its first week of release. collaborated on the theme for Lena Dunham’s Women of the Hour.

#Clockmaker podcast serial#

The worlds of high-profile podcasting and music are melding: Nick Thorburn from Islands composed music for Serial Merrill Garbus of tUnE-yArDs wrote the New Yorker Radio Hour’s theme Andrew Dost from fun.

Podcast music has become its own cottage industry: WNYC, New York City’s NPR affiliate, employs house composers for its stable of shows, and most podcasts with any budget contract musicians to write original theme and background music. (Bank parking lot, O’Hare International Airport, a cold kitchen.) I’ve heard that guitar riff three times in my life, under Jurgensen’s words, and I can tell you exactly where I was each time. Mostly, it just repeated with neutral insistence, turned over itself again and again in the same way this mother circled her grief. It was silent when she seemed to need silence. The guitar was there under the moment when she bellowed the eldest’s name into the hills. It was a quiet, low bit of an A-chord that ebbed and flowed under her story about her daughters, who were there one May morning and gone by the evening. Underneath her voice, there was a simple riff on the electric guitar. I feel powerless in trying to make you accept this evidence: They were here. “I would like you to have heard me talking to them just once, if only the telephone. The segment was on This American Life, from a 2001 episode called “ Stories of Loss ,” and something about its author, Genevieve Jurgensen, pinned us to our seats in a kind of reverent and abject horror.

#Clockmaker podcast full#

She and I were parked outside the local bank, and we’d come to a full halt in the middle of our errand to finish listening to the woman’s voice on the radio. My first encounter with what we’re going to call “the space” happened at age 13, sitting in the front seat of my mother’s black Ford Expedition.