Sean Talley the sounds of a policeman's beard being half constructed http://www.seantalley.com/podcast/index.html en-us 2006 Sean Talley Wed, 6 Dec 2006 01:06:00 PDT I started my podcast with the desire to share sounds that I find meaningful and inspiring. I hope you also find them helpful. For more visit http://www.seantalley.com I used to be really into albums. When I would listen to music, I'd almost always play an album from start to finish. Albums were like novels to me - each song its own chapter - and reading a chapter by itself just wouldn't work. But then podcasts came along, and I found some very smart, creative people sharing surprising mixes. It's as if they're collecting chapters from other authors' books to tell their own stories. Now I find myself listening almost exclusively to podcasts. Digiki and Shane Lester's podcasts are my current favorites. I listen to them almost everyday, and they've inspired me to share the music that's come to be soundtrack of my daily life. Sean Talley hello@seantalley.com No http://www.seantalley.com/podcast/images/podcast_500.jpg http://www.seantalley.com/podcast Music http://www.seantalley.com/podcast/seantalley_podcast_01.mp3 http://www.seantalley.com/podcast/seantalley_podcast_01.mp3 Last month I had a suspicious mole removed from my chest, and I got six stitches. I have a history of getting squeamish whenever my skin is punctured, but the procedure was fine. My surgeon and I shared stories of being exotic in Japan. The following day, I woke up to clean the wound for the first time, and upon seeing the stitches, I feinted. My chin broke my fall, and I found myself at the hospital for the second time in two days. I was listening to the Fan Club Orchestra track when I fell (the one with the slide whistles). This is my first podcast. It started as a very quiet mix (think Morton Feldman), but it's changed a bit. It grew to be more eclectic and playful. I like to think of my podcast as a snapshot of the music that's in my life at this time. I wonder how this will all sound in six months, a year, a decade? Podcast Sun, 1 Oct 2006 02:30:00 PDT Sean Talley No 00:56:15 Sean Talley Art Design Sound Mixtape Music Polypunk Shane Lester Japan Sharing Happiness Inspiration Love Volume 1 Silence Quiet http://www.seantalley.com/podcast/seantalley_podcast_02.mp3 http://www.seantalley.com/podcast/seantalley_podcast_02.mp3 I visited a local cafe recently to get some tea. After receiving the tea, I paid the cashier and left a tip. The cashier said, "thanks," and just as she was finishing the word, another employee behind her turned on a faucet. The two sounds blended together perfectly, and the "thanks" became "thankssshhhhhhhhh." Looking back, I can imagine the chain of sounds going further. I reply to her with a "sure" just as the faucet is turning off. The cashier looks to the next person in line and says, "ready?" before I can finish my "sure." And the next customer says, "yes, I'd like a small coffee pleasshhhhhh;" the hissing cappuccino machine completes his sentence, as I step out of cafe into the wooosh of the street traffic outside. Creating podcasts has changed my relationship to music. I find myself constantly searching for new songs, and evaluating them in terms of my latest mix. This time I wanted to create something that's a bit more varied, silly, and wild than my last volume. Listening now, it clearly reflects my chaotic, frenetic October. Podcast Sat, 4 Nov 2006 03:30:00 PDT Sean Talley No 00:59:52 Sean Talley Art Design Sound Mixtape Music Polypunk Shane Lester Japan Sharing Happiness Inspiration Love Volume 2 Chaos Mess http://www.seantalley.com/podcast/seantalley_podcast_03.mp3 http://www.seantalley.com/podcast/seantalley_podcast_03.mp3 Listening to songs sung in unfamiliar languages can be a strategy for what Momus calls "disorienteering" – seeking out the unusual and unstable. When I hear foreign music I feel like a baby. It reminds me that the world has been here for a long time before I arrived. Rather than struggling to construct meaning from it, I prefer to relax and let the strange newness slip into my ears. Music with vocals in a foreign language can be considered instrumental music. The words are incomprehensible, so you're free to construct your own narrative based on the formal qualities of the song. The delivery of the vocals may give you a clue to the emotional range and meaning of a song, but this is no different than any other recorded instrument. And your perception of the music is influenced by the language(s) you speak and the culture(s) that you are familiar with. A dog's bark sounds like "ruff ruff" to an English speaker and "wanwan" to a Japanese speaker, "hoang hoang" in Thai and "gav gav" in Russian regardless of how it sounds and what it means to a dog. Podcast Wed, 6 Dec 2006 01:06:00 PDT Sean Talley No 01:01:25 Sean Talley Art Design Sound Mixtape Music Polypunk Shane Lester Japan Sharing Happiness Inspiration Love Volume 3 Chaos Mess Leonard Cohen Pink Floyd Talking Heads http://www.seantalley.com/podcast/seantalley_podcast_04.mp3 http://www.seantalley.com/podcast/seantalley_podcast_04.mp3 It's 1AM on Tuesday, and I'm sitting at my work table in front of my computer. I can hear the fuzzy, high pitch of my iMac, the blowing and buzzing of my electric heater, my old refrigerator knocking and droning, the neighbors' occasional creaky footsteps, the smooth blob voices of a television set muffled by walls and floors and ceilings, the staccato plastic clacking of the keys under my fingers, the fading white noise of cars in the distance, and a faint flowing sound that I assume is water and waste in the pipes in the walls of my apartment building. Volume 4 has been slightly delayed by the holidays. My sincerest apologies; I hope this hasn't caused you any concern. I've already begun work on Volume 5 which should be available by the end of January. Podcast Tues, 16 Jan 2007 23:28:00 PDT Sean Talley No 01:00:25 Sean Talley Art Design Sound Mixtape Music Polypunk Shane Lester Japan Sharing Happiness Inspiration Love Volume 4 Chaos Mess John Lennon Cornelius Lullatone Nelly Furtado Gnarls Barkley http://www.seantalley.com/podcast/seantalley_podcast_05.mp3 http://www.seantalley.com/podcast/seantalley_podcast_05.mp3 Halfway into the month, this podcast was heavy on blippy, digital beats and 60s psychedelic rock from Peru, Cambodia, and Turkey. Then I got a haircut, and all of a sudden I wasn't into the mix. So I started again. A week ago, all of the washing machines at Super-Duper Limpio (the closest laundromat to my apartment) were full, so I lugged my laundry a block up 22nd Street to the nearly empty Mission Laundromat. I stuffed my darks and lights into two side-by-side top loaders, plunked 14 quarters into the coin slots, and sat down on a bench to read Yvonne Rainer's autobiography Feelings are Facts. But I didn't get much reading done. There were the shaky, rubby, watery sounds of the washing machines to my right and the tumbly, thumpy, clicky-clacky sounds of the driers to my left, as a young woman, folding clean towels, started to sing. Podcast Wed, 14 Feb 2007 23:19:00 PDT Sean Talley No 01:04:32 Sean Talley Art Design Sound Mixtape Music Polypunk Shane Lester Japan Sharing Happiness Inspiration Love Volume 5 Laundromat Sonic Podcast Beatles Boredoms Black Dice http://www.seantalley.com/podcast/seantalley_podcast_06.mp3 http://www.seantalley.com/podcast/seantalley_podcast_06.mp3 I definitely slipped a bit with this volume, but I hope that it doesn't prevent you from enjoying it. Personally, I'm trying to learn to relax and be a bit more patient. This is my hip hop mix. I wanted to learn more about hip hop, so that was the starting point. I tried to find songs that somehow fit into my understanding of the genre of hip hop, or songs or musicians that are influenced by the conventions of hip hop, or songs that at least remind me of hip hop. And it was also important to me to maintain the sensibility of the other volumes of my podcast. I was listening for smaller sounds. It's common for hip hop to valorize boldness, boastfulness, and invincibility, and I tend to find those qualities disturbing at best. So it was a challenge for me to find hip hop that I could identify with. You may think that most of these tracks don't really qualify as hip hop, but after all, you aint nuthin butta grimey ho. Podcast Thurs, 5 Apr 2007 00:40:00 PDT Sean Talley No 00:58:01 Sean Talley Art Design Sound Mixtape Music Polypunk Shane Lester Japan Sharing Happiness Inspiration Love Volume 6 Podcast Hip Hop French Japanese Hot Chip Fourtet http://www.seantalley.com/podcast/seantalley_podcast_07.mp3 http://www.seantalley.com/podcast/seantalley_podcast_07.mp3 I may be growing up - or maybe I'm mistaken - but either way I'm starting to realize that I have certain preferences. I appreciate certain things more than others, and I'm just now figuring out what those things are. There are certain qualities that make me feel comfortable and happy. I generally like things that are small, clean, soft, quiet, and slow. The thing that I prefer the least is conflict. Over the past few years I've developed a major preference for anticlimactic things. I can't yet articulate it well because I don't fully understand it, but I can say that there's a clear political aspect to it. I strongly believe that a story without conflict can be interesting and worthwhile. But how do I sleep with the fact that preferences are the outcome of pitting one thing against another - the essence of conflict? Is it even possible to prefer not to prefer? Podcast Thurs, 19 Apr 2007 01:06:00 PDT Sean Talley No 01:04:02 Sean Talley Art Design Sound Mixtape Music Polypunk Shane Lester Japan Sharing Happiness Inspiration Love Volume 7 Podcast Noriko Tujiko Takagi Masakatsu Hypo Momus HALCALI Lucky Dragons http://www.seantalley.com/podcast/seantalley_podcast_08.mp3 http://www.seantalley.com/podcast/seantalley_podcast_08.mp3 I'd say that about 90% of the music I listen to comes to my ears through headphones. By putting the sound source directly on my ears, it's as if my ears are in the same position as the microphone(s) that recorded the music. My ears are sort of disembodied so they can occupy that space, but it's a simulation. It's not like I'm really there. In many cases, it would be impossible to position my ears in that way. If I turn on a faucet and shake my head back and forth, the frequency of the sound of the flowing water seems to change (this is known as the Doppler effect). Now if I were listening to the sound of a running faucet on a pair of headphones as I shook my head back and forth, it would not change the sound that I hear. I would hear the same thing as if that running faucet—and the room containing it—were attached to my head, shaking back and forth along with it. Podcast Tues, 29 May 2007 23:13:00 PDT Sean Talley No 01:00:59 Sean Talley Art Design Sound Mixtape Music Polypunk Shane Lester Japan Sharing Happiness Inspiration Love Volume 8 Podcast Infinity Headphones Black Moth Super Rainbow Cornelius Kama Aina Konki Duet Takagi Masakatsu HALCALI Lucky Dragons The Books http://www.seantalley.com/podcast/seantalley_podcast_09.mp3 http://www.seantalley.com/podcast/seantalley_podcast_09.mp3 I love the sound of my doorbell. It's the most wonderfully cliché ding-dong you've ever heard. It's such a silly, cartoon sound. It's as if the designer of that doorbell took the onomatopoeia literally. I can clearly remember that sound, but I don't understand how I remember it. Humans can remember sounds. There are some sounds we can never forget. We store sounds in our heads, and we can sort of recall them at will. But it's not the real sound we're recalling, is it? Aren't sounds actually the vibrations of matter (most commonly air) that is detected by our ears? When we replay sounds in our heads, we're not really vibrating matter, are we? This is a confusing idea to me, and it's made even more complicated by the fact that most of us cannot accurately recreate sounds we remember. I can describe my doorbell to you with language, or I can mimic the sound by vocalizing the "ding-dong" (which in the case of my doorbell is actually pretty close to the real thing); but without the aid of a recording device outside of my body, I have no way to relay the sounds I've experienced in my life with the richness and color of their actual occurrences. Podcast Wed, 18 July 2007 22:28:00 PDT Sean Talley No 00:59:36 Sean Talley Art Design Sound Mixtape Music Polypunk Shane Lester Japan Sharing Happiness Inspiration Love Volume 9 Podcast Infinity Doorbell Pandatone Tummy Boards of Canada OOIOO Bobby Birdman Colleen Efterklang Ivor Cutler http://www.seantalley.com/podcast/seantalley_podcast_10.mp3 http://www.seantalley.com/podcast/seantalley_podcast_10.mp3 I have a guitar that I play occassionally. There's no real sense of purpose when I play guitar, so I generally just start with one note and then play another one after that and think about how the two notes sound one after the other. Of course all the notes sound different, but playing one note and then a second note and then a third seems pretty arbitrary. So I have a hard time writing songs because I don't see why one note should follow another. The reason why I like music is because I really can't understand why musicians make the sounds that they make. It's odd to me. How do they decide which sounds to use and when to use them? How do they know that C followed by F and then G is right? When I mix a podcast, I have the same sense of confusion. I try sorting out the songs and putting them into a sequence that seems reasonable, but I suppose they could go in any order. In the end it works out quite well because when all of the potential sequences are considered more or less the same, any order I choose will always be the best. Podcast Fri, 10 Aug 2007 01:21:00 PDT Sean Talley No 00:59:17 Sean Talley Art Design Sound Mixtape Music Polypunk Shane Lester Japan Sharing Happiness Inspiration Love Volume 10 Podcast Infinity D.A.F. DJ Elephant Power The Knife Deerhoof Sora Yukihiro Takahashi Confusion http://www.seantalley.com/podcast/seantalley_podcast_11.mp3 http://www.seantalley.com/podcast/seantalley_podcast_11.mp3 On Thursday there was some road construction underway at the intersection of 21st Street and Mission Street. There was a tall police officer in a reflective vest directing traffic. The tall police officer in a reflective vest waved his long arms through the air and the cars around him followed the movements of his hands as if pulled by strings. And the tall police officer in a reflective vest had a string of his own that came out of his ears, down the length of his torso, past the reflective vest, and into his left hip pocket. At the end of that white string, there was an apple. I wonder what the apple was telling him. Podcast Tue, 2 Oct 2007 01:33:00 PDT Sean Talley No 00:59:45 Sean Talley Art Design Sound Mixtape Music Polypunk Shane Lester Japan Sharing Happiness Inspiration Love Volume 11 Podcast Police Officer Aoki Takamasa Cornelius Ryuichi Sakamoto E*Rock http://www.seantalley.com/podcast/seantalley_podcast_12.mp3 http://www.seantalley.com/podcast/seantalley_podcast_12.mp3 At my office we recently switched to GMail as our email client, and I installed a GMail notifier add-on in Firefox to alert me of incoming mail. I had the option of choosing a sound for the notifier to play whenever I get a new message in my inbox. First, I set it to a gentle glockenspiel tone that I got from my friend Shawn. The sound was really nice, but I never noticed the alert because it always fit so perfectly with the music I had playing in my headphones. So I soon changed the sound to a dog bark. I was flossing my teeth about a week after I chose the new alert; and as if to signify the receipt of some internal message, the saliva squeezing between my cheek and my molars produced the sound of the dog bark. Podcast Sat, 22 Dec 2007 14:16:00 PDT Sean Talley No 01:03:48 Sean Talley Art Design Sound Mixtape Music Polypunk Shane Lester Japan Sharing Happiness Inspiration Love Volume 12 Podcast Dog Bark Lucky Dragons Greg Davis Shugo Tokumaru Flim Takagi Masakatsu Caribou Taste of Tea http://www.seantalley.com/podcast/seantalley_podcast_13.mp3 http://www.seantalley.com/podcast/seantalley_podcast_13.mp3 A few years ago I bought a little, yellow Nintendo Pokemon Pikachu Pedometer at a garage sale. I kept it in my pocket, and with every step I took Pikachu grew stronger and healthier. After a few weeks Pikachu grew up completely, and I grew completely bored. He was fully mature and no longer progressing, just maintaining his size and doing the same pathetic tricks again and again. It was obvious that Pikachu was just going through the motions. Our relationship soured, and I eventually put the pedometer into a box in my closet where it remains to this day. And now when I'm lying in bed in the still darkness of night, I hear distant electronic chirps coming from the closet. Podcast Sun, 8 Jun 2008 22:26:00 PDT Sean Talley No 01:01:52 Sean Talley Art Design Sound Mixtape Music Polypunk Shane Lester Japan Sharing Happiness Inspiration Love Sleep Sleeping Summer Gentle Volume 13 Podcast Japanese Pikachu Teasi Dale Berning Sinebag Emi Necozawa Pumice Taunus Muffin