An update on AudioDocumentary.Org's exclusive blogging of London's radio features shindig last week. Clocks & Clouds was great. The speakers were delightful, and so were their selections of audio. I came away with lots of good new places to look for interesting documentaries, and will be sharing those with you here over the next few weeks. To start us off, When An Angel Passes, a delicious montage of the passion for great radio, by some of its greatest practitioners, which premiered at the conference. Outside the scheduled sessions, producers paid and unpaid, students formal and informal mingled and learned from one another. It was also good to see staff from the BBC World Service, where hundreds of redundancies have been announced, escaping that worry for a day of positivity and encouragement.
Marking International Woman's Day, "A Woman of No Consequence" from the CBC. Told in a simple manner, this story is at times sad, at times reaffirming. The ordinarly-extraordinary story and sonic qualities of the protagonist's voice lift it above a straightforward interview, to something musical and moving.
Doctors in one Southern California town are making house calls on the homeless. Diane Bock joins healthcare pros who make the streets a little less mean for their patients.
So, I caught-up with some of the Clocks and Clouds crowd yesterday. Julie Shapiro is indeed here and as lovely as everyone says. However if it's possible to kill with kindness, or by over-radio-ing, we might just find out by the end of Saturday's event.
Moving on to the other guests:
They include something rather rare: a sound artist who's been accepted into the radio establishment. John Wynne skips between Resonance FM (the radio-art community station in London), and BBC Radio 3, the highest-brow radio station around (whatever about the minging website).
It can be tough to gauge the BBC's documentaries as many of them disappear off-line after one week, for contractual reasons. So we have quite a rare opportunity when Laurence Grissell roots out some picks of the BBC archives for us. For me this is possibly the biggest deal of the event!
But as a boy, I do like a bit of a tech, so Peter Nash's session should satiate the geek-monster within. He's from SADiE, which is the audio editing system used by many of the finest radio makers outside North America. Looking forward to it, and if you're there, say hi!
Connor Walsh, AD, London
Tuesday March 1 2011
There's a one-day crafted radio event coming up in London, and I'll be bringing you updates from it, here on AudioDocumentary.org. The event, on Saturday, is called Clocks & Clouds, and is organised by In The Dark (disclosure: I volunteer for In The Dark as well as AudioDocumentary.org). Guests include Julie Shapiro, well known to radio listeners in the USA from The Third Coast Festival. It's linked there over there in the sidebar on the right, see? This tweet would suggest she's already in town:
@ThirdCoastFest Third Coast representing at the BBC tomorrow, noon. What should we wear?
There are three other guests providing opportunities that we can't really get online, however I will write about those for you on the day, assuming you can't make it there in person – I'm told there are some tickets still to be had. The day will close with Julie Shapiro and Francesca Panetta premiering "When an Angel Passes…" a radio feature, about the the radio feature, made by producers all around the world. If it goes online, I'll share it with you here, because it would take a miracle for those two to work together and produce something not worthy of listen by you lot. Keep checking back, and I'll update this post with good audio finds on Saturday.
