Get that fresh clean feeling!

I don’t listen to the radio a whole lot, but when I do, lately it’s AM. You see, AM become pretty obsolete, which means it’s become cheap, which means any wingnut with enough bananas can get on the air. Weird stuff is proliferating again on America’s airwaves. Of course, a lot of the wingnuts are christian wingnuts, but they’re entertaining in their own way. Heck, I just heard a modern, full-cast audio drama on earlier this week, on the radio. It was good! And produced by Focus on The Family, which I find amusing, but who else does that anymore?

Radio is an interesting medium, and I maintain that the more primitive the radio system, the more interesting it continues to be. Look at XM, for instance. 3700 channels, all carefully programmed and crystal clear wherever you are. There is never any question of what you’ll hear, where you can hear it, or how it will sound. Now compare that with shortwave radio, all the way at the other end of the spectrum. With shortwave, you never know what you’ll find when you turn on your receiver, if someone will be having a conversation or making a broadcast, or where in the world it’s coming from, or if more than one person is trying to use the same frequency at the same time, or if you’ll get anything at all. You can still sometimes find spy numbers broadcasts in shortwave alongside police scanners and conspiracy theory shows and truckers and music and god knows what else. It’s adventurous and interesting.

AM is  by it’s nature less orderly than satellite or FM, and it’s been getting crazier at it’s gotten cheaper. On a clear day you can listen to broadcasts from all over your planetary quadrant with just the receiver built into your car. You can hear what happens when the signals of two different stations, hundreds or thousands of miles apart, cross their signals. And, thanks to the thriving time-brokered AM market, you can hear some righteously weird shit.

Yes, I’m weird, sometimes I’ll listen to radio static because it has a particularly interesting sound to it. Not the point.

So all this gave me the idea one day to see if I could simulate the sound of multiple radio stations broadcasting on the same frequency. It’s a distinctive sound. And that idea tumbled around in my head for a few months, and I had a pretty good idea of how to make it happen, and then my head turned towards podcasting. Because everything is about podcasting. I thought I might be able to use this (theoretical) technique to make a little statement about what it’s like trying to be a podcaster.

You see, there are about 50 podcasts out there with really world-class audiences, about a thousand with very worthy numbers, and there’s the rest of us hoping one day to be noticed by anyone at all. While the Top 20 Podcast list on iTunes has gone through some changes lately and for the better (no more Oprah or Joel Osteen, thank god), it’s still very much a place where the whales just trade places with each other and suck up most of the listening hours themselves.

So you want to know what it’s like to get heard? This is what it’s like to get heard. Your voice pokes out now and then, if you’re lucky, but mostly you’re drowned out by the big boys, and your message gets destroyed, and then everyone else gets stomped on by Ira Glass.

Technically, this was a very easy piece to assemble. It’s entirely aleatoric, with only beginnings and endings considered. The levels were processed by the Audacity Auto Duck plugin, just one after the other, and everything was just left to chance, and the effect turned out to be quite interesting. You’ll hear my Episode Zero, and you’ll hear the most recent episode of This American life, and the most recent episodes of 3 other top 20 podcasts in iTunes, and I will award a brass figlagee with bronze oak leaf palm to the person who can name the other three shows featured herein.

Enjoy. Or don’t. It doesn’t matter. Nobody’s listening anyway, not in the grand sense.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Ok, I know most of you don’t read the words in the file notes, let alone the words on the website, but I’ve told every other network about it, so you guys get it too.

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Hey everybody,

If you’ve talked to Dani and I over the past year or so, you know we’ve been busy. Busy busy. Crazy busy. We’re running around selling jewelry and building websites and working jobs and neglecting basics like vacuuming and dishes, and it’s gotten to the point that something has got to give. So, we’ve sat down and thought about it, and decided to pursue the path of fewest pants — we’re shaking things up a bit* and going full time freelance.

Cue the gasp orchestra.

What does this mean? For us, it’s a massive revolution in lifestyle. For YOU, it doesn’t mean a heck of a lot except to know that we’re officially open for business, and what was a small side thing is now our bread and butter. We design websites, we do graphics and logos, we host internet things, we do copywriting and copyediting, we produce new media content, we advise you on your new media content, we can design email advertising and newsletter layouts, we can fix your computer, and we can talk to your group of people about all that and a lot more.

We’re not begging you to hire us**,  we’re just asking that you keep us in mind during your day to day. Does your company hire freelancers or temps for projects? Do you know someone who wants to sell things online? Does your church want to teach its members about sane internet use? Heck, does your church’s website need updating? We’re open for business and ready and willing to do what you need. Our prices are good, and like all new freelancers we’re a little bit desperate for work.

So, please, keep us in mind. If you’re not sure if we can do something, call, ask, email, tweet or send up smoke signals. We’re not just flexible, adaptable and good at finding fixes to problems, we’ve also both had bizarre careers that left Dani and I with a strange and broad collection of skills. Check out our newly revamped website [link] to find out more.

*A note about Sweet Tarragon: It’s no secret that we really dig the jewelry thing. We’ll be taking a bit of a break from that in the coming year to pour all of our energy into hot glue media, where it needs to be right now. We have plenty of shows booked through September, so we’ll be finishing out the season, and we plan to keep going with our consignment gigs, home shows, and custom work. Sweet Tarragon will still be open for business, but on a much smaller scale.

**That’s a lie. Yes, we are.