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Notes from Marianne
This conjures a former relationship from a lifetime ago. The actual events took place in rural Maine in the 1970′s. It’s about a recurring theme in the lives of many of us — whether we are financially poor, politically targeted, or just ill wed — and that is the quandary of whether to fight the dubious fight…or flee. It’s also about those quirky and oblique epiphanies that finally set us irrevocably on the path of action! It is a departure for me — being the most minimalist piece I’ve ever done.
It began as a challenge at a gathering of Canadian and US audio artists that occurs every August around the time of the full moon, put on by the Canadian Society for Independent Radio Production. The setting was the screen porch of a boxy 19th C farmhouse in Quebec a landscape just before North takes over forever.
A collection of sound junkies sat at the feet of our mentor, Chris Brookes. We were sweaty and hungry, elbows crumpled on the wood floor, or backs sagging in old couches, and waiting for lunch. But before we could eat we were told to find a quiet spot with a partner and each talk about a "turning point" in our lives. Afterwards we would edit each other’s work into a story.
Structure, tension, pacing, "dead cats", etc.
So out we went into the leafy understory and recorded.
After lunch my partner had to leave unexpectedly and couldn’t finish the project. I wound up editing my own "turning point" and came up with this piece, which I now call Deviation.
This was recorded on the verge of an old logging road. I used a Sharp 722 mini disc recorder and an AT813a cardioid condenser mic – which go with me everywhere – even to the supermarket. I later processed the recording on Sound Forge and edited it with Cool Edit Pro.
The recording conditions were not pristine even if the surroundings were! You will hear aleatory sounds in the background: the occasional car on gravel (it’s the postman), and the dinner bell ringing lunch (I wish you could smell the
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food). These were subtle and actually fit perfectly with the story I was telling, so I made no attempt to edit them out. I just kept taping and, yes, I was uncharacteristically late for a meal!
About Marianne Rahn-Erickson
I had a very brief career in radio almost 30 years ago, writing commercials for tractors and hair perms and dime-a-dip suppers at a tiny station in southern Maine. I was a lousy salesperson, but loved the fact that they left me alone in a room with a typewriter and bunch of SFX. And paid me for it!
Time, marriage and a lousy economy set me down the road – to Europe, Canada, and rural communities in the northern US. I’ve been a print journalist, a fiction writer, a performer, a counselor, a mother, a farmer, and an ESL teacher. Last summer I became a "Mystery Campground Shopper", driving surreptitiously around the planet, reporting loose guardrails and damaged outhouses to the proper recreational authorities.
I’ve recently been on another Fight or Flight hiatus, living out in the Dawdler (my 1994 Ford pick-up) around the Canadian Maritimes, and trying to get up heart to re-enter the working class fray back in the U.S.
At home I run Anarcha Projects, my fledgling audio business, in the far upstate of New York. I get paid for things I never heard about from my guidance counselor, like recording funerals, and designing sound for cartoons and theaters. I’ve gotten a few state arts grants for documentary work too including one for Making Ends Meat, about rural workers who moonlight as BBQers. (No kidding. Pork prep is alive and well, and being done by road crew guys and medical doctors – in towns like yours – all over the North Country!) My last job was a commission to design an aural history of tap dance for the National Museum of Dance.
All pretty cool if I can keep it up.
In my spare time I raise boys and taxes on a farm with 53 hoofed, beaked, and fanged mouths to feed. I co-produce a weekly news and public affairs show (Capital District Progressive Radio/Talking History) at WRPI in Troy, New York.
And P.S. I’m still looking for the perfect day job.
On public radio, we serve up our stories pretty straight. In fact, much of what we play is not a story at all, but a Q&A or a sequence of facts, artfully strung when the producer has time. If there is a narrative curve, it tends to follow the customary waypoints; you get your lede, your body, your closer, maybe a complication or a twist.
But the tools of radio production and the imagination allow for more than that. In the early days of portable remote gear, multi-track, outboard effects, public radio stories messed around with non-linear story, collage, sonic adventure. It was possible, it was fun, it was the 1970s, so why not? The films of the 70s show the same spirit. In a maturing industry, some of the play has gone away. Stories have straightened out.
Marianne Rahn-Erickson recorded "Deviation" in the woods at the time of the full moon, and produced it with a folding and unraveling technique, full of forward motion, but taking clever advantage of our medium’s tools to roll out the story. It is interesting to imagine this piece on public radio now. Our bet is that it would arrest your attention and you would listen.
This piece grabbed my attention in the first 10 seconds and held it for the duration. Marianne’s story, told through clever use of multiple layers and repetitions of her voice, sounds as if we are listening both to a narrator’s spoken words and her unspoken thoughts drifting in across time.
At first, I was smug in my prediction about what I thought the conflict was going to be. But then I enjoyed being proven wrong as the piece progressed on another track – only to arrive suddenly at a point confirming my original hunch and surprise me again.
Lovely internal / external dialog and space-time shifting here.
compelling listening, seems much shorter than it is.
It was a powerful experience to hear this one more time. I was sitting on the floor, also at the feet of Chris Brookes, when Marianne played the first incarnation of this piece for the first time.
The painful honesty was the first thing that made me sit up and listen. I didn’t really pay attention to anything but the words at that point because the words were so intense, personal and stark. I found myself thinking about emotional risk-taking, and how difficult it is for us to put ourselves in the story, even when the subject matter isn’t difficult. I think it takes a secure soul to do work about ourselves, and all the more when the memories are painful. How does one trust our listeners enough to be able to put those real feelings out there? I haven’t been able to manage that yet, but your piece demonstrates that it can be done if we have the creative courage.
On a technical note, Marianne, I think the overlapping of your voices was a skillful way of moving through time, giving us the sense that this is a real event, but a very unreal and subjective interpretation of the facts. It moves it to another dimension.
And finally, it is really wonderful to see such a fine work come out of the Full Moon Audio Art Camp. As the camp’s founder and producer, it makes me feel really good that the conditions were right for you to create such an poignant and well produced piece of work.
Thanks for sharing
Victoria Fenner
http://www.magneticspirits.com
I really, really like this piece. It reminds of some of the great radio drama productions that come out of the BBC and the CBC. I like how the story unfolds — it really draws me in. It’s a little confusing, but in a good way — I want to figure out what’s going on and what’s going to happen.
I wish this had a travel angle cuz then I could play it on my show.
I also wish there was a place on American public radio that could play this story now. Is there?
Ben
I also wish I coulda been around in the 70s.
I loved finding myself into the middle of this mysterious beginning, the sound of something, gravel, shells, fragments of a conversation, words coming like waves, carrying me right along into this story about a dog and a marriage dying. I love the voice doubling on itself, that echoey timber and the gravel create a great rhythm, and I loved how the story came back to its beginning phrases. It’s just very satisfying.
Marianne, did you find your way to this edit quickly? What happened on the way?
>the overlapping of your voices was a skillful way of moving through time, giving us the sense that this is a real event, but a very unreal and subjective interpretation of the facts. It moves it to another dimension.
I wonder why Victoria characterized the interpretation as "unreal?"
Hi Marianne!
thank you for this piece!
How long was this cooking in you? In some ways was it a surprise?
When you recorded this were you talking to a friend? an imaginary friend? the full moon?
did you do several takes or repeat yourself while you were talking? is that where you got the idea of how to mix it?
Wow! Many thanks to all of you for your comments and support.
I’ll try and answer the questions.
I was speaking directly to another, younger, woman as I told the story, and it was just a one-time run through of the events. I was trying to fulfill Chris’s directive to include as much description as possible in the scene setting – instead of just spieling my “feelings” about the “turning point”. Concentrating on the visuals, I think, helps make most speakers more comfortable from the get-go.
I suffer from what I call the “Brooklyn Crescendo”, which is a speaking style that is probably also familiar to anyone with a large family, New York or not. It comes from the pulse of the dinner table: one person says something, another person has a thought and throws it into the conversation, someone else calls out a response – the whole thing builds and happens fast because if you don’t say it quickly you won’t get another chance. It’s almost an honor when you get a response like that because it means you’ve hit a nerve. It was the spoken word pattern of my childhood. In those days, in that place, this was not considered rude behavior; it was survival – pure and simple.
So, this piece feels a bit like that to me. It also feels like the endless kvetching I go through as I am making any decision. I am not very straightforward. I talk to myself a lot, verbally and otherwise. The voices of my friends and family clang in too. So in Deviation I am hearing the voice of my 50 year old self recounting an event to a stranger, but I also hear my 50 year old self forgiving the 20 year old husband and wife that we were then for their awkward attempts at learning to be better humans.
Anyway, the fact that I talk so much (and do my own sort of call and response with myself), literally gave me lots of material to double back with in the edit.
The edit did not take very long by my usual nit-picking standards. It was a workshop piece, so no time to fret too much. Most of it was done before breakfast one morning while everything was quiet. The only SFX – the sound of dirt being shoveled – was a sound I had previously recorded and was the only appropriate one I had on my computer at the time. It was actually me hand-throwing pebbles into a hole at a construction site, just to save as a stock sound in my collection.
Have I been carrying it around a long time? Was it a surprise? No, not really. I mean, it’s not something that has been eating away at me. Basically I had to pick a “turning point” for the exercise. I selected this event because I see it that way now. After this actually happened, a series of darker things occurred that I chose not to share. As it happens, I’m glad I choose this particular “hinge” – because of the responses I get from people.
Everyone has, for lack of a better phrase, his or her own dead pet story. And they always seem to be real touchstones. What other thing can you get people to talk about that so quickly gets them to their core? Maybe birthing stories, or stories about parents dying? Like banana peels to the soul!
I just read an article where Muriel Rukeyser is quoted as saying “The world is made of stories, not atoms.”
I like that. But I have nothing against atoms. Actually, I’m seeing the stories behave like atoms…the elements and sounds ricocheting off one detail onto another image off the next fact, etc. Changing, bringing diverse tellings. Until, at some terrible point, we choose to “stabilize them”, and hope for the best.
And speaking of stories, I really want to know WHY Ben wishes he’d been around in the ‘70s! WHO have you been listening to?
Best to all!
Marianne Rahn-Erickson
Thanks for the candid story about the story, Marianne. what fun.
Could you tell us about the photograph? When and how was it taken? It had me ready for anything! Between that and the title I was ready for witchcraft or… I don’t mean to say it was a distraction. As soon as your voice started I forgot about the photo.
Hi Nannette -
The "on-the-rocks" picture was taken by a friend while travelling in Wales. We were on the cliffs of Moelfre harbor, on the Irish Sea, on the north coast of Anglesey, Wales. I was doing my usual "capture the sounds" thing – which means I’m annoying as hell to travel with because I want to stop and make everyone shut-up with I record something or other. In this case I had just finished retrieving my dangling baby shotgun mic from a crevice in the cliff which led down to a "cave" beneath the rocks. I was getting the sound of the tide crashing in the cave. Since my young friend was documenting her childhood bunny’s first trip to Europe (some people ARE stranger than me – and they’re usually my friends!)I was hamming it up by recording the rabbit’s response to our new-found audio.
The second picture was one I took this summer when I was the Mystery Campground Shopper and, obviously, didn’t want to be recognizable.
BTW, Moelfre is fascinating place – having the distinction of being on one of the most treacherous bits of coast in the British Isles. Lots of sad, sad, shipwrecks and a crackerjack Sea Rescue Squad. Charles Dickens wrote about the place in 1859 following the wreck of 133 ships during one particularly bad storm! It was a book of non-fiction called The Uncommercial Traveller. I think he was sort of an ambulance chaser in those days. Anyway, after taping the sea, my friends and I retired to the pub where Dickens boarded at that time. We had a pot of tea and met a couple of really cool Border Collies. Yes, they’re now on tape, too!
well, better than the 00s anyway. Plus people were making neater radio in the 70s and 80s — before it got all NPR Newsy and popular. Listening to the stuff Jay and Larry Massett, Scott Carrier, Carmen Delzell, Kitchen Sisters et al. did back then, I think it’s better than most of the stuff floating around today. But on the other hand, we were all poorer back then and if you add up the signal to noise, I’m sure it worked equivalent. Maybe you’re right though. Maybe the 00s rule too. It’s just hard for me to believe that.
Ben
I don’t know, Ben. Why, just yesterday on your show, the new David B. did a funny segment commenting on how similar his voice is to the old David B., ending it with a couple faked impressions. Later in the same show, there was a skit parodying the California situation as if it was a game show. Pretty neat radio for a business news show.
not exactly what I’m talking about. It seems like people are less willing to mess around with story, narrative and structure these days. And I think that’s true not just for radio, but most media. That movie Momento came out and everybody was blown away — "Dude, they told the story BACKWARDS!" Whoa.
In radio, things like Deviation can’t find a home because a) it’s not news (disqualification from 80 percent of shows) and b) there’s no clearly demarcated narrative (disqualification from the other 20 percent).
But I like pieces like this one because they are so hard to categorize. Precisely because it sounds different. People talk a lot about experimentation these days, but it’s always doing stuff like the Marketplace segments you’re talking about — hardly ever things like this. Hardly ever anything that means anything.
I’m with Ben.