The Thaw & Die Grenze

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Ice cubes fall from a tray in the clouds. Digital render by Jeff Emtman.

 

Jeff walks to the edge of Berlin and explains why the Here Be Monsters feed has been quiet for so long. 

On the way, Jeff talks about plans for upcoming episodes, looks at the ways that moving to Berlin has changed him, and discusses a pair of films featuring Tilda Swinton: Cycling the Frame (1988), and The Invisible Frame (2009). Both movies feature Swinton riding a bicycle around the entirety of the Berlin Wall—or, in the case of the latter, where the Berlin Wall used to be. 

Please follow Here Be Monsters on Patreon: patreon.com/HBMpodcast

Field recordings heard in this episode (starting around 17:20) : a former site of the Berlin wall in Marienfelde  ~  birds and insects near Portbou, Spain  ~  canoe paddling near the in Germany’s Spreewald  ~  geese and peacocks calling on Peacock Island (Pfaueninsel)  ~  dusk crickets near Locarno, Switzerland  ~  a massive pipe organ that was part of Italy’s submission to the 2024 Venice Biennale  ~  public transport boats in Venice revving their engines  ~  Jeff singing in a bathroom while a faucet drips  ~  Water splashing against cement in Banyuls-sur-mer, France  ~  Hiking the Walter Benjamin memorial trail on the France / Spain border  ~  Baby goat at the peak of a mountain on the France / Spain border  ~  A canal boat passing in Amsterdam, Netherlands  ~  An announcement bidding visitors to be quiet while visiting France’s Cathedral of Our Lady of Strasbourg.  

Producer: Jeff Emtman
Music: The Black Spot

 

HBM153: Klänge from Berlin

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Digital render by Jeff Emtman.

 

The composer Pauline Oliveros thought there was a difference between hearing and listening.  She defined hearing as a passive act, something done with the ears.  But she defined listening as something active saying that listening happens in the brain.  

 

Recording a dog in the Saxony region of Germany.

Sam Parker is a recordist who takes inspiration from Oliveros’ words and work.  About six years ago, on an episode of Here Be Monsters called Sam’s Japan Tapes, Sam shared dozens of recordings he made during his first (and only) trip to Japan.  He released those recordings under the name Observance as an album called Japan, 6/21 - 7/14.

On this episode, Here Be Monsters host takes two trips to Germany, and records the sounds of Christmas in Berlin, New Years in Saxony, and many hours of people and birds just going about their daily lives in the late winter and early spring. 

Before Jeff leaves on his first trip, he calls Sam Parker back, to ask for recording advice before the trip, and Sam offers three tips: 

  1. Take lots of time.

  2. Capture moments of everyday routine. 

  3. Trust your instincts

  • MM:SS - Description. (📸 = Photo)

    08:45 - Train to SeaTac airport.
    09:45 - Announcements on an Air France flight.
    11:00 - Turbulence and people rustling.
    12:30 - Berlin's Brandenburg Airport
    13:15 - A brown swan hissing and chirping
    13:30 - Boats rubbing against wooden piers and a small dog barking.
    14:15 - Cars driving on cobblestone streets.
    14:45 - Ice Skating at Berlin's Alexanderplatz 📸
    15:30 - Swing ride with metal chains at Alexanderplatz. 📸
    16:00 - Riding on the subway, then walking up several flights of stairs.
    18:45 - Radio playing advertisements, news, and Christmas music
    20:45 - A Christmas Eve service in a cathedral with a speaker reading a children's story.
    21:30 - Christmas carols playing as people mill around.
    22:00 - A wedding party in front of the Brandenburg Gate.
    23:15 - A Christmas exhibit with a lit up polar bear and fog machine.
    24:00 - Birds chirping in Berlin's Mauerpark as people walk by.
    25:00 - Crunching frosted leaves on a cold morning.
    25:30 - Walking through a forest in the Saxony Region of Southern Germany.📸
    26:15 - Whistling through hands in the forest.
    27:00 - Buying 5 kilograms of potatoes from a vending machine as a dog barks.📸
    27:30 - Mountaintop shop selling hot drinks and snacks in Czechia.
    27:45 - Chopping kindling. Distant fireworks echoing through the hills in Saxony.
    28:30 - Snaps and pops of a small fire
    29:00 - Distant fireworks to celebrate the start of 2022.
    29:30 - Close fireworks echoing.
    30:00 - A strong wind blowing on a mountaintop in Saxony.📸
    30:30 - A tree swing creaking.
    31:15 - 6AM on the outskirts of Berlin. Traffic starting, crow screaming.
    32:45 - Captive pigeons fluffing their feathers and cooing at Hasenheide Park
    34:00 - Slow motion recording of a sudden hailstorm.
    34:30 - A motorized billboard in a subway station
    35:00 - Accordion player performs in a subway station in Berlin's Mitte neighborhood.
    37:45 - Applause after a play.
    38:15 - A small bird singing several songs.
    39:30 - Church bells ringing.
    40:45 - Wind flapping the torn domes of the Teufelsberg listening station as people sing.📸
    43:00 - Walking through the forest near Teufelsberg as bikes pass.

 
Buy the album!

The recordings on this episode are available as an album called “Field Recordings: Germany, 2021-2022” and it’s available for purchase on Bandcamp, under Jeff Emtman’s pseudonym: The Black Spot.  Until June 30th, 2022, all profits from the sale of this album will be donated to The International Committee of the Red Cross. 

 

Producer: Jeff Emtman
Music: Remixes from HBM049: Sam’s Japan Tapes.
Photos: Jeff Emtman
Thank Yous: Sam Parker, Johanna Gilje

 
 
 

Sponsor: HBM’s Patreon Supporters

Here Be Monsters’ supporters on Patreon send a small monthly payment.

Listener Kit Roberts supports HBM on Patreon, saying “I’m a patron of HBM because no other podcast has ever made me feel like this one does…so small and singular and yet connected to everything all at once.”

Thank you so much, HBM Patrons.

👽 Become a patron 🤖
 

HBM119: An Episode of Pebbles and Twigs

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Image by Jeff Emtman

Image by Jeff Emtman

 

The end of our seventh season draws near! Just one more episode until we hang up our podcasting hats for a few months. We don’t want you to miss us too much though, so on this episode, we’re tying up some loose ends, answering some questions, and sharing ways that you can stay connected with us even when our podcast feed is quieter.

Content Note:
Sexual references and bodily injury

Five ways to help us out this summer

  1. HBM Summer Art Exchange.  You like to make art?  You like to get art? Exchange something with a fellow HBM listener.  All you have to do is fill out this form. It’s free (well, except for postage).

  2. Merch. Did you know that we have HBM shirts, stickers, art prints, books, sweatshirts?  Already have those?  Fear not, we’re working on a something new for next season.

  3. The VOICE Hotline Dataset.  In 2017, Jeff FOIA’d Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for the records of the calls made to their VOICE hotline.  The (heavily redacted) spreadsheet contains 5,164 calls with many pieces of metadata for each call record.

    Google Sheets Version. This is a version that we’ve cleaned up a tad, added some useful analysis to.  You can view and comment collaboratively here.

    CSV Version. This is a version that you can use offline in software like Excel and Tableau.

    ICE FOIA LIbrary Version.  This is straight from the source.  Our FOIA is listed under Reports → VOICE Log: Apr. 2017- Oct. 2017

  4. Super Secret Facebook Group.  We have a top secret Facebook group.  If you want to be a part of it, just find it.  That’s the only test to get in.

  5. Voicemail Line.  Call us anytime.  Tell us your stories or record strange sounds, or ask us questions.  We love it when you call. Our number is (765) 374-5263.

More reporting about the VOICE Hotline on Splinter and the Arizona Republic.

Many thanks to the data scientist Ahnjili Zhuparris for the help with the VOICE dataset.  She created a whole slew of data visualizations for us here.

Producer: Jeff Emtman
Editor: Jeff Emtman
Music: The Black Spot

 

Country of Birth data from the VOICE FOIA dataset. Visualized by Ahnjili Zhuparris.

HBM112: Negative Space

/ biltmore hotel/

image by Jeff Emtman

 

Back when HBM host Jeff Emtman was a photographer, he used to solve his problems with walks in the woods.  There, he’d see the ways that branches frame the sky. As an artistic concept, negative space gets hogged a lot by the visual arts.  In this episode, Jeff attempts to wrestle the concept into the sonic world; address his current problems by listening to the spaces between words and by listening to the ambiences of a semi-empty, possibly haunted hotel.  

Below are some excerpts from Jeff’s ~2011 photo series called Portraits without People and the original version of HBM021: Potential Energy…the version with words.

Producer: Jeff Emtman
Editor: Jeff Emtman
Music: The Black Spot

 
 

👇 Excerpts from Jeff Emtman’s 2011 Series, Portraits Without People 👇

HBM095: The Bats that Stay

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Illustration by Jeff Emtman

 

Not all migratory bats migrate.  We don’t know why some choose to stay behind at their summer roosts.  But according to the University of Washington’s Sharlene Santana, the bats that stay tend to die.  

Content Note: Fleeting language

In this episode, HBM host Jeff Emtman attempts to make a metaphor about bats and humans.  Perhaps it’s anthropomorphic, perhaps it’s unnecessarily poetic, or perhaps it’s a fair one.  

Jeff leaves his home in Seattle to move cross-country to Boston.  Along the way he takes a five day layover in Colorado to meet up with an old friend (Helen Katich) and her girlfriend (Laura Goldhamer).  The three drive from Denver to the San Luis Valley of Central Colorado.  They visit Valley View Hot Springs and walk to the mouth of an abandoned iron mine 10,000 feet above sea level called “The Glory Hole.”  

 
 

The Glory Hole houses an estimated 250,000 Mexican free-tailed bats each summer.  These bats migrate in from Central and South America to eat bugs and raise their pups.  They fly together at dusk in gatherings visually similar to the murmurations of starlings.   This bat species, also known as the Brazilian free-tailed bat, is extremely social, and perhaps nature’s most gregarious mammal species.  

Despite this, their social and hunting calls are completely inaudible to humans.  They produce ultrasounds, sounds too high pitched for human ears. But some audio equipment (see below) can still record these sounds, then computer algorithms can pitch them down into human-audible sounds.  

 
Helen Katich

Helen Katich

A preserved Mexican free-tailed bat at the welcome center of Valley View Hot Springs

 

One evening, Jeff and Helen and Laura hike to the mouth of the mine.  At this vantage point, they watch some of the bats flying out and Jeff manages to record some of their loud, ultrasonic vocalizations, before the storm forces them back downhill.  The next day, Jeff flies to his new home in Boston.

Jeff recorded the bat calls in this episode with a Tascam DR100MK3 at 192kHZ sample rate and an Echo Meter Touch 2 Pro at sample rates of 256kHZ and 384kHZ.  The calls were recorded at frequencies of approximately 21kHZ to 36kHZ and time/pitch-shifted with Elastique 3.2.3 Pro.

Producer: Jeff Emtman
Editor: Bethany Denton
Music: The Black Spot and Laura Goldhamer

 

HBM080: The Ocean of Halves

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Drawing by Remi Dun’s partner.

Drawing by Remi Dun’s partner.

 

Remi Dun enjoys her job. She's good at it, she makes good money, and she generally enjoys her clients’ company. And although her job rarely gives her sexual pleasure, one client with a curious tongue gave her two surprise orgasms. Another client doesn’t know that she stops making sexy faces as soon as he can’t see her. And another client simply wants companionship—his dad died recently and he’s still emotionally raw. And yet another client wants a rubber band around his balls—the thick blue kind you find on broccoli in the grocery store.

Content Note: Sexual descriptions and swearing.

Remi is a part-time sex worker.  She uses pseudonyms.  She’s not out.  She worries that her friends would see her as destitute and her parents would convince themselves they’d been bad parents.  Still, Remi finds joy and security in her secret second job. She hopes to someday be out and proud, like the ones who have inspired her.  

Balancing her “daytime” and “nighttime” selves is part of a bigger plan: to create a financial stability, to be fierce, to practice her feminism, and to develop her own romantic relationships with partners outside of work.  Though, sometimes she feels lost in her identities, swimming in what she calls “the ocean of her halves.”

Remi contacted us to share her secret.  We mailed her a recorder for several months to record diaries and sounds from her life.  If you have a secret you’d like to share, please get in touch.

Bethany Denton and Jeff Emtman produced this episode. Our editor at KCRW is Nick White.  We are a part of the Independent Producer Project of KCRW.  

Music: The Black Spot, Serocell

 
The contents of Remi’s bag, laid on a bedsheet. Contents include coconut oil, wet wipes, money, mouthwash, hosiery, lube, tampons, pepper spray / mace, condoms, cell phone charger, deoderant, eye drops, and cosmetics.

The contents of Remi’s bag, laid on a bedsheet. Contents include coconut oil, wet wipes, money, mouthwash, hosiery, lube, tampons, pepper spray / mace, condoms, cell phone charger, deoderant, eye drops, and cosmetics.

 

We’re on Season break!  We’ll be back with Season 6 starting in the fall.  Thank you for your supporting comments on Twitter, your reviews on iTunes / Apple Podcasts, and your likes on Facebook.  We’re already working on Season 6.  It will be even better.