100% Pure Petroleum Jelliffe

Because of a non-anonymous tip (thanks Jay), I checked out the hosts of WNYC’s Radio Lab at the Apple Store in Soho yesterday. The hosts, Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, base an hour long show around a broad topic, crafted from interviews and ambient sounds and the result is a really engaging story. I’ve only heard one episode, and that was today, but I literally got goosebumps.

They create a narrative by editing the interviews to create rhythms and tensions that you can’t get from the original audio. It’s not true reporting in that sense, but it adds so much to the experience. And it really is an experience. It’s not like listening to someone explain something like how people hear sound. It’s not even like listening to an explanation with explanatory sound effects in the background either. It’s musical. The sounds they create to go along with the speech affect you like music does, which is completely separate from how words affect you. The trap they could fall in is adding sound for the sake of adding sound, but they don’t.

Last night, they talked about the central ideas behind the show and some technical aspects of how they do it. Like all the best things in life, it was organic. When they met, they realized they had both worked and went to school at the same places, albeit 25 years apart. Jad, the younger one, does all the sound manipulation, and Robert acts as the straight man for the stuff they talk about. They would do the show early in the morning or late at night, so they wouldn’t have to worry about people getting in the way.

Their common interest is in creating a unique sound for their show. Not just coming up interesting topics, but doing it in a unique way. That’s been my hallmark for good music, and as I said before, there’s something very musical about what they do. It’s not just informative, the most recent show explains how Genghis Khan has 19 million direct descendents in Asia, but also entertaining.

Radio Lab is now the only podcast I subscribe to besides KEXP. Their website has a streaming archive of all their shows, and subscribing to the podcast downloads the new episodes to your computer. It also airs on NPR, Fridays at 3PM for the next few weeks.