Re:sound #88: The Messages Show

This hour: phone solicitors, bottle evangelists, a mysterious cassette tape unearthed in the attic, and more.

Muriel's Message
by Mira Burt-Wintonick (CJLO, 2005)
Digging around in her parent's basement, Mira Burt-Wintonick unearthed an old cassette with the words "Muriel's Message" scrawled on the side. She popped it in her tape deck, listened, and discovered -- among many other things -- that the sound of a voice can capture dimensions of memory that a photo or written words never will.

Muriel's Message won the Best New Artist award in the 2006 Third Coast Festival/Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Competition.

Silence
by Joan Schuman
Words can be such clumsy tools of communication -- it's never easy to say exactly what we want to say. One man decided to solve the problem by taking a vow of silence. Which worked well for him. Until, that is, he met someone that he really, really wanted to talk to.

Debt Collector
by Roman Mars (Wait for the Beep, Third Coast Festival, 2008)
When e-mail, instant messaging, text messaging, cell phones, palm pilots, and personal communication devices abound, it's really hard to be unreachable. Someone, somewhere, is always trying to get through to you. And sometimes it's someone you really don't want to hear from.

Take me Out
by Carma Jolly (Wait for the Beep, Third Coast Festival, 2008)
A musical meditation on loneliness and an unavoidable fact of modern life: the phone solicitor.

Bread on the Waters
by Neil McCarthy and Gregory Whitehead (Between the Ears, BBC Radio 3, 2006)
Bottle evangelists try to spread the word of god by writing biblical passages on small pieces of paper, stuffing those pieces of paper into bottles, and throwing them into the middle of the ocean by the thousands, hoping they'll settle on some distant shore and be discovered by non-believers.

This episode of Re:sound was produced by Roman Mars.