January 29, 2004
Solo

This is five hours of trains, from the building of the transcontinental railroad through the Old West one-and-a-half centuries ago, laced with sounds and dialog from “Once Upon A Time In The West,” to Robert Bloch’s mid-20th-century tale of the Hellbound Train and the hobo jungles of the depression, to Disneyland’s enshrinement of the railroad as toy transportation. You’ve seen all those sound effects discs with the sounds of trains? Well finally, here they all are, from steam to diesel and high speed stereo passes that will blow you right over. America has produced many songs about riding railroads and we have some of those too. And in the end, the whole thing arrives right on time.

5 Hours

January 22, 2004
Solo

Several very old episodes of “The Shadow” from late ‘30s radio are mixed together, with a young Orson Welles playing The Shadow in most of them. Playboy Lamont Cranston, who has the power to cloud mens’ minds, moves invisibly through plots ranging from the deadly burning man contaminated by a radium experiment, to the mad director of a sanitation department who schemes to poison the city’s water supply, to the haunted mansion in which an old hag keeps children she and her hunchback son have kidnapped. He is followed by his reporter girlfriend, Margo, and a whole bunch of old and new songs about shadows and their moods. Among the music, Raymond Scott’s Microphone Music backs up these murky radio landscapes with his uniquely wacky jazz from the late ’30s. An extended look at this melodramatic old radio pulp fiction and Orson Welles’ fairly forgotten role in it.

3 Hours

January 8, 2004
Solo

Dr. Oslow Norway of One World Advertising begins with some introductory disjointed walking ramble about his joint, which is hardly enough to cover the breadth of this AS edition. We roam the mental environment of advertising with some of the practitioners and many of the examples. Negativland plays a big part in this one with a feature on their advertising related work from Public Radio, also the current level of consumer identity acquisition through product tagging technology, tricks of the trade, angry and sarcastic callers who appear to not like advertising at all, big time jingle writing, and culture jamming and the Adbusters philosophy which suggests this mental environment should be cleaned up because it’s making us sick.

3 Hours