Damon Krukowski Will Change How You Listen
“Ways of Hearing,” Damon Krukowski’s new six-episode podcast, makes us think about the act of listening itself, in ways that feel timely and vital.
Damon Krukowski’s new six-episode podcast, “Ways of Hearing,” begins with an exciting analog sound: that of a needle descending on a record. Krukowski, the musician and writer best known for his work in Galaxie 500 and Damon & Naomi, tells us, “The first record I made was all analog.” It was 1987, and making a record didn’t require numbers or data. The tape decks, mixing board, and microphones were mechanical; music was recorded in a shared common moment. “And so my bandmates and I set up our instruments in the studio, we counted off, and we played our songs,” he says. We hear sublime music: Dean Wareham’s guitar, Naomi Yang’s bass, and Krukowski’s drums, beginning Galaxie 500’s funny, heavenly “Tugboat.” Audio technology, whether analog or digital, conveys wonderfully human sounds: emotion, music, art. But the shift to digital has transformed recording, listening, and even the way we experience time and space, in ways we might not fully comprehend.
One of these transformations is the rise of the podcast. Today I begin a weekly column, Podcast Dept., in which I’ll be talking to podcast creators, listening to podcasts with a critical ear, reviewing the popular and the obscure, and paying attention to the form of podcasting as it evolves. Krukowski’s “Ways of Hearing” is the first show in the Radiotopia network’s new podcast, “Showcase,” which will highlight a succession of short-run podcasts. I chose to begin with “Ways of Hearing” both because it offers the immediate pleasures of a great podcast—interesting ideas presented in a sound-rich, thoughtfully produced narrative format—and because it makes us think about the act of listening itself, in ways that feel timely and vital.
“Ways of Hearing” evolved out of Krukowski’s recently published book, “The New Analog: Listening and Reconnecting in a Digital World,” about how the way we listen has changed with the shift from analog to digital. The book’s objective is not “uncritical nostalgia,” he writes—it’s to identify the good things that this shift imperils and to get us to think about how to preserve them, in the spirit of Jane Jacobs’s writing about urban spaces. Krukowski worries that digital listening, in all its ubiquity and convenience, threatens the quality of our listening and attention. He wants us to become more careful and aware, and he wants to encourage harmony between the analog and digital worlds.
In the book, he does this through explorations of mono and stereo, signal and noise, “The Dark Side of the Moon,” loudness, the CD revolution, and so on, with wit and verve; we learn the Victrola-based origin of the saying “Put a sock in it” and see a photograph of Nigel Tufnel’s custom volume knob. The aural particularities of headphone listening, he tells us, make us experience what we hear inside our head. “The headphone album of the 1970s was meant to take you elsewhere—not into the street, but certainly out of your bedroom, where you were tethered to the stereo by a coiled cord like an astronaut tied to an orbiting spaceship,” he writes. “Close your eyes, turn up the volume, and fly into headspace.” Cut the cable, as we now have, and we “risk confusing the external world with the internal one.” We all understand this: I once turned off “Invisibilia” for fear of falling through a sidewalk hatch.
Krukowski narrates “Ways of Hearing” in a smooth, patient, sound-focussed style, augmented with clips of music, street noise, and field recordings. (The sound of what used to be CBGB’s will make your blood run cold.) On the page or in your headphones, Krukowski is present, engaged, and eager to share ideas.
I talked with Krukowski and Yang in a back garden at their home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, near Harvard Square. Their two cats, Chickpea and Lentil, a.k.a. Caetano Veloso and Maria Bethânia, milled around among the flowers. “The concept for my project was based on John Berger’s ‘Ways of Seeing,’ ” Krukowski said—not the book but the TV series, which came first. “It was a BBC series, just a few episodes, made in the early seventies. Berger was a Marxist. And he’s using this medium that’s obviously extremely popular and that’s reaching into every English home, and he is quoting Walter Benjamin and giving this different view of what our visual culture might mean. It’s fantastic. He’s so generous of spirit—a quality that I really admire. He really wants to share the information, but he doesn’t talk down. It’s clearly meant for every household.” In the first shot of that series, Berger, dressed respectably but casually, with curly seventies hair, walks up to Botticelli’s “Venus and Mars” and cuts the face out of it. It’s a reproduction, we realize. With this provocative gesture, Berger plunges us immediately into ideas about art in the age ofmechanical reproduction.
“I was thinking about podcasting and digital sound in general, how everybody’s walking around with earbuds,” Krukowski went on. “And it’s a moment that’s very similar to the TV in the late sixties, early seventies, where this hypervisual culture is happening. Suddenly you have this visual medium in every home, and people are just consuming it. But Berger was making you aware of it. To me, the success of ‘Ways of Seeing’ is that he’s making the viewer aware of the television as well. And so it becomes a critique of television itself.” Today, he said, “everybody is surprisingly unquestioning about audio.” He wants to help change that. “Without passing judgment, necessarily. I just think there’s a strange lack of questioning.”
Each episode of “Ways of Hearing” focusses on a different aspect of the analog-digital audio shift: “Time,” “Space,” “Love,” “Money,” and “Power.” (The sixth has not yet been named; a seventh, bonus episode, “Ways of Song Exploding,” is a collaboration with the forensic music podcast “Song Exploder.”) “Time” is full of fascinating observations about how digital technology has altered our relationship to time: if you’ve ever wanted to hit Undo on something in real life, you understand. He approaches the question musically at first, by talking about analog tempo in music performance and how it can often be variable, even among professionals.
“Musicians know time is flexible,” he tells us. “You steal a bit here, give a bit back there.” We hear a solo cello, some jazz, some funk, a hand-cranked Victrola. “Hip-hop d.j.s used speed controls on a record to match it to another and keep the groove going, or, in the studio, to pile up samples from older records and make a new one,” he says. We hear the beginning of “Can I Kick It?” and the voice of Ali Shaheed Muhammad on the NPR show “Microphone Check,” talking about how he and the other members of A Tribe Called Quest noticed that the analog-based musicians they were sampling sped up and slowed down, sometimes even within a two-bar phrase. Galaxie 500 did this, too, Krukowski says: “We were nervous and excited, and we sped up at the chorus.” In analog time, we make up for imperfections as we do elsewhere—with improvisation and moxie.
A big shift came, Krukowski tells us, when bands started recording to a digital metronome—the click track. Machine time is precise. (To illustrate this, he cues up the Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me”—synthesizer and staccato, peppery beats.) The precision and control afforded by digital time can allow for other kinds of variability, in ways that can mess with our head. Krukowski talks about podcast listening speed, speeding himself up to 1.25x, “like I’m manic,” and slowing down to .75x, “like I’m drunk.” Latency, the lag between real time and computer-processed time, messes with us, too. It used to be, he tells us, that in Boston, when the Red Sox scored at Fenway, you could hear simultaneous cheering from open windows in cars and apartments all over the city. But after June 12, 2009, when United States TV stations switched from analog to digital, people watching on TV and listening on the radio were no longer experiencing the same moment. Now the sound of cheering in Boston is staggered. It’s observations like this, enhanced with sound clips—and, here, a great interview with the Red Sox radio announcer Joe Castiglione—that make “Ways of Hearing” such enjoyable listening. It continually gives you a feeling of Ah, yes, that’s what’s been going on.
Krukowski and Yang live in an analog utopia with digital enhancements: a sunny space in an ivy-covered building, with high ceilings, a piano, and media galore (a book called “The Revenge of Analog”; a button that said “ask me about my podcast”). Krukowski showed me the living room, where he and Yang record music, and the mixing room, where he mixes music on an old analog mixing board after importing a digital file. “Galaxie 500 were on a sixteen-track, but Kramer”—the legendary musician and producer—“had one broken channel, so we had fifteen,” he said, looking pleased.
“Recording with people long-distance is the new status quo,” Krukowski said. The ubiquity of digital recording, coupled with the ease of sending large sound files in recent years, has dramatically altered the songwriting and collaboration process for many musicians. Krukowski mentioned his recent collaboration with the British avant-garde folk musician Richard Youngs, in which Youngs requested a drum track, Krukowski recorded one and sent it, and Youngs, instead of using it on one song, used it on the whole album. Krukowski laughed, delightedly. When Galaxie 500 recorded, and when Damon & Naomi record, the focus is on a shared moment; digital technology can inhibit such shared moments, but it also opens up what a shared moment can mean.
“Ways of Hearing” makes you highly attuned to such shifts, and to the complexity and variety of aurally connecting. The second episode, “Space,” out later this week, takes us to Astor Place, Radio City Music Hall, and beyond. “In Tokyo, people on crowded trains pretend to be asleep to avoid eye contact,” he says. “But here, with all these headphones, it’s like we’re avoiding ear contact.” The act of listening, we realize—not just in conversation but in our headphones and in the world—is significant. How we control sound, how we use it to insulate ourselves, to transport ourselves, to educate ourselves, to provoke thoughts and to distract ourselves from thoughts, to connect, to escape, can have social, even political, ramifications. And listening to podcasts—these intimate, sophisticated constructions of sound and ideas—can connect us intensely to other people and isolate us from our surroundings at the same time.
Krukowski is especially convincing, even poetic, about the artistic and social value of noise—which headphone listening and digital audio often shut out. “Space” ends with a lovely story about a visit he paid to the composer John Cage in the early nineties, at the apartment that Cage shared with Merce Cunningham, on Sixth Avenue. “When I arrived, he was sitting at a table by the window, composing music on paper, and the windows were open,” Krukowski says. The roar of the city was vivid: buses, shouting, honking. (We hear a little Cage, a little noise.) “But John Cage said he never closed the window,” Krukowski says. “Why would he? There was so much to listen to, all the time.”
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