Sean Talley
Podcast
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I've come to regard each of my podcasts as a collection. Of course they're collections of songs, but they're also collections of moments in my life. Music so readily lends itself to representing lifestyles. Perhaps this is a marketing trick, but the trick has been repeated so many times that it has become the truth. I'm surely not the only one who associates different genres of music with different ways of living. And to me, a "way of living" or a "lifestyle" includes everything in your life down to the way you hold your spoon—if you hold one at all.
When I listen back to my past podcasts, I remember the times during which I chose the particular songs. Though I can't always recall the precise moments, I can revisit the thoughts and feelings around me during those weeks and months. Obviously those same recollections simply aren't there for a listener other than myself (unless that person is particularly close to me), but it would make me smile to know if my podcasts serve as catalysts for personal memories for other people too.
Oftentimes I get so caught up in the discreet moments of each day that I overlook the fact that larger trends in my life are rising and falling. To overcoming this myopic tendency, the podcasts below can be thought of as a collection of collections.
http://www.seantalley.com/podcast.xml
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Volume 13 – June 2008
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Tracks
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.
Sinebag — Collection d'electroniques vétustees
Teasi — Glad To Be Alive
Dale Berning — Swimming
Haruka Nakamura — Graf
Taunus — Harriet
The Banjo Consorsium — Talk About You
Cokiyu — Org
Minamo — Puk
Pumice — Darkpark
Emi Necozawa — Noah's Ark
Nika Soup & Saya Source — Ipiyayamaeiku
Steve Jansen — Life Moves On
Muffin — Sleeper
Fourcolor — Vaporize
1:01:53 Minutes (56.7 MB)
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Volume 12 – December 2007
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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.
Dorine_Muraille — Muraille_3
Lucky Dragons — Adult Elk
Empress — Known For Years
Greg Davis & Sebastien Roux — Paquet Surprise
Semuin — Wilma
Shugo Tokumaru — Tears Below The Freezing Point
Flim — Given You Nothing
Takagi Masakatsu — Mio Pianto
Takeo Toyama Ensemble — Breath
Y.A.C.H.T. — So Post All 'Em
Sketch Show — Stella
Haruomi Hosono — To The Air
Nagisa Ni Te — Piho
Amiina — Seoul
Nique — Loronoi
Opitope — A Quiet Morning Arriving To The Valley
Don Nino — A Thousand Lights
Arrow Tour — Humidity Of Mountains
Eiji Mitomi — Moon
Caribou — 218 Beverly
Little Tempo — Akira ni "Omedetou"
1:03:48 Minutes (58.4 MB)
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Volume 11 – July 2007
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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.
Bill Wells Octet — Wiltz
Sora — demo1126
Sakamoto Ryuichi — Lamento (Haruomi Hosono Remix)
Hauschka — Two Stones
Haruomi Hosono — Down to the Earth
E*Rock — Thursday Morning
Asuna — Light Blue Waltz
Dorine_Muraille — Madrague, Retour
Cornelius — Like a Rolling Stone
J. Hunt — String 9
Davide Balula — Lorsqu'il n'est plus
Ogurusu Norihide — Change
Oto — Color
Aus — Apt
Letraset — Print
The Banjo Consorsium — Grizzly
Midori Hirano — Leaving
Sawako — Yumenoat
Aoki Takamasa — Frozen Fountain.
59:45 Minutes (54.7 MB)
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Volume 10 — June 2007
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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.
Dick Raaijmakers — Ster Tune 6
Kashiwa Daisuke — Do Re Me?
DJ Elephant Power — Feu Flute
Dear Nora & Casiotone for the Painfully Alone — Hot Boyz
Soul-Junk — Mercury
Digiki+Piccolo — Pancaked (DJ Chienloup — Procrastination Mix)
Buffalo Daughter — Bird Song
Deerhoof — Spiral Golden Town
Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft — Der Räuber Und Der Prinz
Good Books — Leni (Crystal Castles Remix)
GoGooo — Cochon Pendu
Bobby Birdman — Victory At Sea (E*Rock Remix)
The Knife — Heartbeats
Yukihiro Takahashi — Extra-Ordinary
Sora / Garland — Spring
Higuchi Eitero — Shoo
Antonelli — Sleeptrack
Domotic — Smith Kline
59:17 Minutes (54.3 MB)
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Volume 9 — May 2007
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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.
Ivor Cutler — Filcombe Cottage, Dorset
Jack Finlay, Douglas Grindstaff, Joseph Sorokin — Dematerialization
Yi Yi Thant/Aung Heina — Good Time
Pandatone — I Refuse To Meet You Half Way
Orval Carlos Sibelius — Never Noticed You Were Me
Kira Kira — Epitaph
Simagrée — Fée Blanche
Efterklang — Redrop
Ljudbilden & Piloten — Björn (One More Year)
Colleen — Bubbles Which on the Water Swim
Schroeder_Pro — Dirt
Bobby Birdman — I Said Ok, The Wind Said, No!
Konono Nr. 1 — Kule Kule Reprise
OOIOO — UMO
Kim Hiorthøy — Teckningar Och Folk
Boards of Canada — Constants Are Changing
Pit Er Pat — Seasick (Hang Ten)
Aus — Tejina
Carpet Musics — Noon
Chihei Hatakeyama — Inside of the Pocket
Hamza El-Din — Childhood (Assaramessugu)
59:36 Minutes (54.6 MB)
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Volume 8 — April 2007
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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.
Powdered Wigs — Intro
Aavikko — P-Piste
Aelters — Usb Gosch Ohm
Mirah — Make It Hot (Y.A.C.H.T. 'Over' Remix)
Flim — Donkey Trains
The Tower Recordings — Q Delmark-O
Lucky Dragons — New Homes
Black Moth Super Rainbow — I Think It Is Beautiful That You Are 256 Colors Too
HALCALI — Styli Styli (Hiroshi Kawanabe Remix)
A&E — Jay
Claudine Longet — Hey, That's No Way To Say Goodbye
Cornelius — Fit Song (The Books 'Eat White Paint' Remix)
Machine Drum — Def In It
Uské Orchestra — Bzwing
Takagi Masakatsu — Eau
Figurine — Connections
Moskitoo — De Siii?
Kama Aina — Wedding Song
Satanicpornocultshop — The Ninth Lamento
The Konki Duet — Birds
1:00:59 Minutes (55.9 MB)
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Volume 7 — March 2007
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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?
Unknown — Owari no Comment
Lucky Dragons — Pleasantries
HALCALI — Hello, Hello, Alone
Margo Guryan — Timothy Gone
Cagesan & Montag — Chandail Maille
Kemialliset ystävät — Taivas ja meri
Tenniscoats — Donuts
Twoth — White Holes
Takagi Masakatsu — Light Song
Momus — Ex-Erotomane
Trico! — A Drop Of...
Miroque — Cradle Song for Shell
Daisuke Miyatani — Drop
Midori Hirano — Inori
Hypo & EDH — Manimal
GoGooo — Don't Worry Little Bear Boy
Mac Donald Duck Eclair — Over the Rainbow
F.S. Blumm — Flocke
Kira Kira — Hjartafanturinn Skrjafar
Asuna — Happy Misunderstanding
Noriko Tujiko — Pop Skirt
Davide Balula — Puis Deconlege
1:04:02 Minutes (58.7 MB)
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Volume 6 — February 2007
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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.
Adam Bruneau — Tweens
Satanicpornocultshop — Pinky
Butter Bullets — Salade de Fruit
Guilty Simpson & Fourtet — Money Motivated Movements
Hinatano — Mobile Phone Music for Sasakisan
Nujabes — Feather
Yuichiro Fujimoto — Sometimes
MC Frosen Pine — Qu'est Ce Que C'est
DJ Elephant Power — Scratch the Hulu
Kid Sister — Pro Nails
Domotic — Mastereo
O.Lamm — Syllabuy of Errors (with Momus)
Miho Folio — Bay Open
Sun OK Papi K.O. — illreme90BPM
Délectable — Celui La
Secret Mommy — Parallel Parka
Avey Tare & Kria Brekkan — Sis Around the Sandmill
Spankrock — Screwville
Hot Chip — Shining Escalade
Piana — Beginning
Jeans Team — Gong
58:01 Minutes (53.2 MB)
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Volume 5 — January 2007
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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.
The Books — Explanation Mark
Georges Brassens — Je Vous Salut Marie
Buffalo Daughter — Airport Rock
Alejandra & Aeron — Crush
GoGooo — Un Essai
Lucky Dragons — Dark Falcon
Miki Odagiri — Rooms
Shinsei — Maiban
d:ve — E:ne Kle:ne Nachm:ttagmus:k
Nobukazu Takemura — The Voice of a Fish
Goodiepal — Flap Nipper_Manipal Inv.
Black Dice — ABA
Twerk — Fake Leg for a Dying Elephant
Vert — Symmetry Breaking
Hanne Huckleberg — Hoist Anchor
Jonnoson — syashinnkakuninn
Moondog — Organ Rounds
The Beatles — Revolution Number 9
Boredoms — Songs Without Electric Guitars
Section Amour — La Ferme Des Animals
Simagrée — Neige Neige
Air King Sound — Mineral
Morgenstern / Lippok — Gammelpop
Merci-S — Summer Days
1:04:32 Minutes (59.2 MB)
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Volume 4 — December 2006
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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.
Secret Mommy — Save As
Colleen Et Les Boites À Musique — Under The Roof
Kazumasa Hashimoto — Monochrome Prome
Gavouna — Trickstick
Big Star — Kangaroo
Shinsei — Quasi
Oomiaq — le tUbe 2 verre
Section Amour — D ton D
Lullatone — Magical…
Domotic — Self-Service and Robots (post-demo)
Nelly Furtado vs. Gnarls Barkley — Crazy
Jab Mica Och El — Side Car Bicycle
Cornelius — Secret Track
Dymaxion — I-Man Transport
Cake On Cake — 1981
B. Fleischmann — Phones and Machines
Nagisa Ni Te — A Light
Melodium — Flacana 05
John Lennon — Love
1:00:25 Minutes (55.4 MB)
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Volume 3 — November 2006
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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.
Pink Floyd — Bike
Cluster — Umleitung
Talking Heads — Crosseyed And Painless
Semuin — Ende
Lucky Dragons — 666
Jab Mica Och El — Biojhelm Light Speed
Adam Bruneau — Cloudsong
.tape. — My Dugong Loves Your Sea-Cow
F.S. Blumm — Blick
Leonard Cohen — Bird on a Wire
Scratch Pet Land — D...
Cian Éthrie — Not So Crystal Clear
Dat Politics — Nude Noodle
Françoise Hardy — Le Premier Bonheur Du Jour
La Malas Amistades — General Electric
Gel: — L'objet
Andersens — Tear
Modular — Perdidos en el Espacio
Bilboas — Lilas
Lyngby Has Let Me Down — The Last Song (Live, Tokyo Uramado)
Okame-hachimoku — Satori
Dick Mills — Major Bloodnok's Stomach
Anne Laplantine — Vega
1:01:25 Minutes (56.3 MB)
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Volume 2 — October 2006
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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.
Amber Papini — And if You're Ready
Cyranq & Phil Emile — [Sic] Song
Jab Mica Och El — Pull Up If I Pull Up
Boredoms & Yellow Magic Orchestra — Cosmic Surfin' Remix
Domotic — Animals Are Ugly (Reprise)
O.Lamm — Description d’un Cylindre, le Souffle du panda mix
Stephane Torchepot & Kola — Morning Test
Tom Tom Club — Wordy Rappinghood
Uske Orchestra — un uske dans le toit (Fan Club Orchestra Remix)
Hot Chip — Colours
Syunsuke Ono — NBHD
Secret Mommy — Grand About the Mouth
Tony, Caro & John — Waltz for a Spaniel
Takeo Toyama — Yawn
The Minders — Our Man in Bombay
Smoosh — Massive Cure
DJ Elephant Power — scrrratccch maldivia
Deerhoof — Sound the Alarm
Pierre Vassiliu — On Imagine Le Soleil
Plants — The Coming Storm has Passed
Gangpol und Mit — Notre vie n'est pas simple. Vous ne devenez pas jeune
59:52 Minutes (54.8 MB)
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Volume 1 — September 2006
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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?
Yuichiro Fujimoto — The Tale of Setting Sun
Joe Jones — Flux Music Box (1966)
F.S. Blumm & Friends — Coop. Comp. V.7
Domotic — Captain Forest's Word of Advice
Fan Club Orchestra — Track 14
Ramona Córdova — One Day, Someday
Les Barbapapas — Theme Song
Tenniscoats — In May Blood River
Asa Chang & Junray — Hana
Caetano Veloso — A Grande Borboleta
Skrew Kid — Speak Slowly
Hanne Hukkelberg — Ease
Shugo Tokumaru — Light Chair
Kinn — Lakara
Piana — Voice
Davide Balula — Eburn (9V)
Maher Shalal Hash Baz — Rock Garden
Scott Walker — 30th Century Man
56 Minutes (51.5 MB)
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