Playlist: Black Mountain Radio's Portfolio
Featured
Invisible Ink
From Black Mountain Radio | 21:01
Fifteen years ago this month, on April 6, 2006, Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison spoke to a crowded lecture hall on the campus of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Morrison delivered the inaugural Black Mountain Institute lecture on refuge and asylum to a large crowd of eager listeners. In this segment, The Believer’s deputy editor and essayist Niela Orr revisits the lecture in an audio piece about home, freedom, and loss.
- Playing
- Invisible Ink
- From
- Black Mountain Radio
In “Invisible Ink” writer Niela Orr attempts to act as a mediator for Toni Morrison’s body of work—including Morrison’s inaugural speech at Black Mountain Institute, which was poorly recorded and archived and hard to understand. The process of creating this piece involved lots of close listening to Morrison’s lecture, attempting to annotate and translate her words like a piece of difficult text. In Orr’s own life, she frequently goes back to Morrison’s work as refuge and looks to her as a beacon of a life that she wants to build. Throughout this piece, the voices of Orr and Morrison are in de facto conversation, building upon each other to create a whole new text.
Playing Friday
From Black Mountain Radio | 12:28
Sam Forbes is a writer, photographer, and actor. For many years, a significant part of her creative practice took place inside what she calls a hidden theater. While working as a dancer at a Las Vegas strip club, she wanted to be seen as an artist. But when she was showing her work in a gallery, she still wanted to be recognized as a stripper. In this segment, Sam unpacks the process of unifying these two seemingly conflicting identities.
- Playing
- Playing Friday
- From
- Black Mountain Radio
Producers Nicole Kelly and Vera Blossom worked closely with Sam Forbes to weave together this piece. Hearing her tell her story of dual identities—stripper and artist—and how she combines them into one. This piece in fact questions the concept of alter egos and dual identities, creating the multiple facets of one artist and layering them over into one image. Where does Sam begin and her character Friday end? Are they truly different parts?
Wooden Heart
From Black Mountain Radio | Part of the Black Mountain Radio series | 17:36
Elena Passarello discusses her relationship to Elvis and his tribute artists during the Coronavirus pandemic.
- Playing
- Wooden Heart
- From
- Black Mountain Radio
In a segment that would originally be all about Elvis Tribute Artists, writer Elena Passerello’s essay turned into a moving discussion on her connection to Elvis and puppets that she brings together with cultural commentary on Elvis’s career and the practice of his devoted fans who pay their tribute to the singer. This audio highlights the well known and stereotyped tribute artists and makes unique connections with the help of original covers by Tyler Tingey and Arthur Moon.
Fodder
From Black Mountain Radio | 14:09
Poet Douglas Kearney and musician Val jeanty discuss their experimental hybrid album, Fodder.
- Playing
- Fodder
- From
- Black Mountain Radio
Recorded live in Portland, Oregon on August 9, 2019, Fodder is a collaborative improvised album produced by Fonograf Editions. This LP (or recorded live performance) splinters the sounds you were looking at on paper into the document you can hear through speakers. &/or vice versa. Drawing in part from the award winning poetry collection Buck Studies’ “Loud-Assed Colored Silence” series, Fodder features new and old texts from poet Douglas Kearney and Val Jeanty’s original composition, samples, and improvisation. Together, they create this live sound chemistry full of raw energy—their collaboration is like a kind of dance improvisation, where both artists bring risk, breath, and trust into a shared space.
Unlike a traditional LP, Fodder truly captures the “vibe” of the live performance as Kearney and Jeanty connect onstage, trusting each other to not lead where the other will not go, during an hour-long improvisational set in one single performance.
This segment blends the live improvisational performance of Fodder with a conversation between the artists, recorded nearly two years later. Music from the live album cuts in rhythmically as Jeanty and Kearney discuss their relationship, trust, risk, and performance—creating a whole new layer of narrative back-and-forths. The result is a deeply rich “text”—a layered conversation that urges you to deeply listen more than the casual podcast experience, to meditate to the music and words and reflect on the vulnerability needed for beautiful art making and true collaboration.
Douglas Kearney is a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly awardee and a Cave Canem fellow. He’s published seven books and teaches Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities.
Val Jeanty is a Haitian-born, Brooklyn-based Afro-Electronic music composer and Professor of music ensembles at Berklee College of Music
See a video from the live performance of “Do the Deep Blue Boogie!” from the album Fodder here: https://vimeo.com/479018087
City Southwest
From Black Mountain Radio | 14:13
In an essay for The Believer, the Black Mountain Institute’s flagship magazine, the writer Kyle Paoletta declares that there is a singular ethos of what he calls the City Southwest. In the essay, adapted for audio by producer Claire Mullen, Kyle explores the distinct literature of these urban spaces. In what follows, you’ll hear Kyle’s narration—plus a conversation with one of the artists featured in his essay, the poet Jimmy Santiago Baca.
- Playing
- City Southwest
- From
- Black Mountain Radio
