Medium Rotation
8 episodes - English - Latest episode: almost 3 years ago - ★★★★★ - 19 ratingsMedium Rotation features artists, writers, musicians, and scholars probing the conditions and countering the received ideas of our time (and other times), along with Triple Canopy editors. Each season is animated by the concerns of an issue of the magazine. The first season, Omniaudience, asks how we understand ourselves and others through listening—and what the obstacles to listening reveal about our society.
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Episodes
Omniaudience: “Little Girls,” by Nikita Gale
May 28, 2021 13:05 - 42 minutes - 39.5 MBA reading of “Little Girls,” Nikita Gale's essay on Tina Turner, Phil Spector, and the prospect of Black performers being heard without being controlled. This bonus episode follows Gale's conversation about Turner—and how the music industry determines whose voices are amplified and whose are silenced—in episode 6. The essay, published by Triple Canopy last year, is read by Kaneza Schaal. Nikita Gale, an artist who lives in Los Angeles, has often engaged with Turner’s music and biography. I...
Omniaudience: Little Symphonies, with Nikita Gale
May 28, 2021 13:00 - 36 minutes - 34.2 MBNikita Gale speaks with Alexander Provan about Tina Turner, Phil Spector, and the prospect of being heard without being controlled. Gale tells the story of the genre-busting song that Turner and Spector, the infamous producer, recorded in 1966, “River Deep—Mountain High”: a commercial failure but a creative breakthrough for Turner, who had previously been defined as an R&B singer and dominated by her abusive husband and bandmate, Ike Turner. Gale, an artist who has often engaged with Turner’...
Omniaudience: Get Lower, with Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste
May 20, 2021 12:48 - 25 minutes - 24.3 MBJeremy Toussaint-Baptiste joins Nikita Gale and Alexander Provan to speak about bass as a way to repulse people or bring them together, cause aggravation or collective pleasure. Toussaint-Baptiste recounts moments in his life when bass, emanating from a parked car or carnival, has shaken his walls, tested his nerves, and made him feel connected to other people, whether or not he appreciates the music blasting from their subwoofers. Ranging from the soundtrack of his childhood in Baton Rouge ...
Omniaudience: The Dead Can Dance, with Tashi Wada
May 13, 2021 10:00 - 34 minutes - 32.5 MBTashi Wada joins Nikita Gale and Alexander Provan to speak about technologies that claim to capture the souls of performers. Wada presents a composition for a “high-resolution player piano” and asks how we discern between human expression and technical perfection, how we listen to virtuosos and machines. He speaks about the pandemic-era vogue for liveness at home, the displacement of pianists by piano rolls (or proprietary software), and the differences between people and marionettes. And, w...
Omniaudience: The Big Society, with Derica Shields
May 06, 2021 10:00 - 40 minutes - 37.9 MBDerica Shields joins Nikita Gale and Alexander Provan to speak about the value of listening to Black peoples’ accounts and analyses of their own lives. They discuss Shields’s book-length oral history of Black experiences of the welfare state, “A Heavy Nonpresence,” recently published by Triple Canopy. Shields reflects on her effort to share the stories of Black people who are mistreated and monitored by the state, while also being made to feel that they should be grateful for receiving the a...
Omniaudience: Holy Ghosts, with Harmony Holiday
April 29, 2021 10:00 - 39 minutes - 36.4 MBHarmony Holiday, a writer, dancer, and archivist, joins Nikita Gale and Alexander Provan to speak about Black performers whose songs and struggles reflect the ongoing trauma of the “African holocaust.” They discuss the pressure to pander to white audiences as well as the impulse to seek a form of expression (and of being) that is chosen and not imposed by force. They listen to songs written and recorded by Holiday’s father, the soul singer Jimmy Holiday, as well as to Albert Ayler, Theloniou...
Omniaudience: Twenty Thousand Bodies Can’t Be Wrong, with Nikita Gale and Alexander Provan
April 23, 2021 12:00 - 29 minutes - 26.8 MBNikita Gale, an artist, and Alexander Provan, Triple Canopy’s editor, are the hosts of Medium Rotation. In the first episode, they ask who we are—and what we can do—as listeners, members of an audience, and bodies in concert (or in conflict). They introduce the first season of the podcast, Omniaudience, by speaking about the revelation of arena concerts, the performance of listening by CEOs and self-help gurus, and how the demand to be heard manifests in protest and property violence. And t...
Introducing Medium Rotation
April 20, 2021 04:00 - 2 minutes - 2.24 MBA trailer for Medium Rotation by Alexander Provan, the editor of Triple Canopy and, along with Nikita Gale, host of the podcast. Why listen? That’s the question posed in the first season of the podcast, Omniaudience. The answer: we become who we are—and relate to one another as individuals and members of a body politic—through listening. But we live in a society that seems antithetical to listening, and set up to suppress the voices of those who have, historically, struggled to be heard. Omn...