Pilot

your level. They have to take you into our server shop and give your transistor fiction. Yeah, getting all over your cabin. Yeah, daddy, Yeah, look at that. Look at that Uncle Jack. He goes he and he bites it his father. I don't hi, Oh that's allowed. I know. Brian. Can you say something, Hi, Bryan, say Hi, Say hi? Hi? Cookie? Got a cookie? Shoes shoes, shoes, shoes, shoes, shoes, shoes. This hundred or so feet of real real tape comes to us from master collector Bob Purse on his blog

Inches per Second. He describes it like this, Today's brief tape may not sound like much to some listeners. I'll leave that to you to decide, but it is a greatly loved little hundred and thirteen seconds for me and a few of my closest friends, and a key tape in my development as a collector of other people's sounds

and memories. This tape came from the a LS Mammoth Music Mart sale, and it was a tape found most likely in the first batch at the first of those yearly sales that I went to, And as a result, this little moment in time, recorded very likely in the nineteen sixties, was among the first, if not the first tapes I found of this sort, and definitely the first to make me want to hear more of this sort

of thing. The fact that it was clearly recorded in Winnetka, Illinois, a town less than a mile from where I grew up, probably helped too. Plus and maybe this is the reason it made such an impression on me. There are a remarkable number of enjoyable little moments for such a short tape. Regardless of the reasons, this is one of the tapes that pushed me into the collector that I had today. What we hear Uncle Jack has brought his tape recorder

over to the home of a family member. A child named Gail, being apparently the oldest child present, is encouraged to talk after not wanting to at first. She then lists several of her friends Lissa and Kelly, and Lynn Jarvis and Mary Jane and Lynne Fische and mentions are school, there's a toddler present, No Brian, and he begins nibbling on part of the tape recorder until told not to. The family then comments on Brian's behavior and looks before trying to get him to say a few of the

words he knows. Can you say something? Hi? Hi? That's it, except it isn't for me. My family and friends, several phrases here have become the sort of obscure references that we all have within our family and friendship circles. Some of the things I love here, Gayl saying it's beautiful. I love it. Uncle Jack worrying about Brian shorting out the transistor. Have to take you to shop the way, Gayle says, Uncle Jack. He goes, he and he bites it.

Gail's mother's description of her son Brian, leading to the essential question can an overbite be nifty? The same woman's wordless vocalizing immediately thereafter demonstrating that nifty overbite. For those assembled, the failed attempts to get Brian to say his new words, including Gail's excited encouragement shoo shoes, shoes. This is one that I treasure above all, but perhaps it doesn't others. If it doesn't live up to the billing for you, well,

then please allow me the indulgence. Bob has curated thousands of home recording oddities from all kinds of garage and rummage sales, sifting through chaotic masses of analog tapes and Final seventy eight's, grabbing anything with an intriguing description and anything unlabeled. Most of these, I'm sure contain nothing of interest. Some are badly recorded or damaged, many are mislabeled. Many are just tapes of pop music recorded off the radio, but a few are absolute gems, stuff you would never

hear anywhere else. Families gathered around the piano, singing songs, predictions of the future five years from now, am radio jingles, scare tactic p s as someday a friend may offer you a trip to a world of colors you can taste and music you can see. Whole unreleased albums by amateur musicians. Wow wow wow reputation. Very good things that defy easy description. Stacks of this media line Bob's House. It's the culmination of a life's work. This is not

necessarily glamorous work. Indeed, it's a grind, digging through haystack after haystack, unsure of which contained needles. It's a labor of love. But the archivist has the spirit of the adventurer, the pilgrim, the backpacker, the urban explorer. The more difficult the expedition, the sweeter the reward. Imagine driving up into the mountains and turning into a dying radio frequency anything.

Maybe it's conservative talk show on one band, and it starts running into Christian hymnal music on the other, and then something altogether different arises, a creation that is greater than simple some of its parts. What's the chance that these two things could collide in such an intriguing way?

What's the chance that this would ever happen again? This feels akin to the process by which David Byrne and Brian Eno crafted their imaginary cultural artifact in the Bush of Ghosts, Competing their new brand of psychedelic dance music against found vocal tracks, evangelist preachers calling radio shows America is waiting before field recorded folks singing, and an exorcism

called on tape? How Still Watercolor fell in love with the bootleg cassette of Gumboots Accordium Drive Hits Volume two, a now lost collection of South African jam sessions that he channeled through his controversial album That Mysterious Thing. You think I have never heard anything like this before. You listen over and over. You feel compelled to share it with others. You attempt to unlock its secrets, Treasures saved from obscurity and eventual oblivion because they're just too fascinating

to put down. These could generally be referred to as ephemeral recordings. Audio that left undisturbed would only exist for a short time. Physical media breaks down, tape rots, final disintegrates, and certain types of recordings have historically been most susceptible to neglect and decay. But of course, all right, so here we are one of the elephants. Alternative alternative, alternative facts, life,

doubleble turn the frigging frogs game. You gotta stop eating the type pods, Hi Doggy, He wrote the word drank the cafe Everyone the least predictable, most confounding era in the history of human expression. In a world where nothing is ever truly deleted, in which every meal of person photographs, every taped hour of video gameplay exists potentially forever, what will be analogous with the ephemeral audio of the past. What is the danger of being lost in the digital age?

And as part of that continuum, old ephemeral things that may have never been seen again now have new life thanks to the efforts of folks like Bob Purse and Rick Prelinger. So much of the ephemera I have cherished was already digitized by the time I got to it. You wonder what miss the cut off? What media in between the advent of recording and the recording of this turned to dust before it could be turned to ones

and zeros? For instance, Florence Lawrence, often referred to as the world's first movie star, acted in over three hundred films in the first third of the twentieth century. She worked for all the big studios, Biograph, imp Lubin, Vitograph. She was the first film actress whose name was used to promote the pictures truly the first celebrity of the medium and the initial linkage of the Hollywood star system. Yet of her staggering film catalog, the majority are now

considered lost films. In other words, no part of the celluloid stock still survives. Born in six in Hamilton, Ontario, Florence was mostly in silent films, but she acted in a handful of sinc sound talkies in the nineteen twenties and thirties before the end of her tragically short life. Hollywood was not kind to flow, and her last roles

were tiny bit parts. So while you can still hear her doing vaudevillian stick as a Russian maid were calling a few words out from a crowd of extras, the remaining over of this once icon grossly underrepresents her voice. Well documented in other ways, this becomes a most inaccessible moment in history. I don't remember how I ended up here, but it was surely the course of some search engine

rabbit hole. I started my professional extremity as ronades, trying to break and relieve to my ronoptic piece that's the voice of Dr Sigmund Freud. Knowing nothing else, I made a copy of the recording and archived it away. It's not exactly pleasant to listen to. The fidelity is low, and the delivery, perhaps because of Freud's strained English, is somewhat painful, but it was unique. Sometime later those hundred and twenty seconds made it into a composition of mine.

That was before I learned that this is the first and only known recording of Freud. He was suffering inoperable jaw cancer. With every word he was an agonizing pain. I can only imagine what compelled him to speak, but in this likely the only time Freud was offered a microphone. What he provided was kind of the business card version of his work. I started my professional activity as a

neurologist trying to bring relief to my neurotic patients. Under the influence of an older friend and by my own efforts, I discovered some important new facts about the unconscious in psychic life, the role of instinctual urges and so on. Out of these findings grew a new science, psychoanalysis, a part of psychology, had a new method of treatment of the neuroses. I had to pay heavily for this bit of good luck. People did not believe in my facts

and thought my theories on savory. Resistance was strong and unrelenting. In the end, I succeeded in acquiring pupils and building up an international psychoanalytics association. But the struggle is not yet over. Color I had? Is all this inherent in the track? Did the conditions of its creation somehow manifest in its mystique? Or maybe I just got lucky? Maybe those things aren't mutually exclusive. Six Filmmaker Ken Jacobs presumably

bought a lot of old newsreels. He used them in his found footage cut ups, But one reel, shot two decades prior, proved to be something different altogether. Quickly, we know where we are. It's February on. Talking crowds are gathered outside of Manhattan's Audubon Ballroom. Malcolm X has just been shot. These are the raw recordings of the camera crew on the ground. We see the same few people interview and reinterview. We hear the responses sharpened, and he

raised his head in the Muslim greetings Alona legum. Like this, the reporter's questions grow hawk is are you angst that both of these men had no part in the conspiracy to kill Malcolm? Where we have two suspects in custod If you're careful, you can catch the facts begin to drift. I can't give you an accurate at least eight shots, and then smack in the middle, a ghostly figure downs the screen. Well has given the order to his followers to see that I am primpled or killed at this one.

A perfect film, as Ken titled it, twenty one minutes forty five seconds of uncut, sixteen perfect, requiring no additional edits. If we were to divide these recordings into categories, I'd file each of the aforementioned examples under perfect. Whatever the intent and conditions of recording, they find us now like immaculate conceptions, preserved, fully formed, and ready to ascribe, meaning you where you see here? Join? Okay? I is are

you joining this? Uncle Jack's nifty is beautiful? I love it. Ephemeral is written and assembled by me Williams and produced by Annie Reese, Matt Frederick, and Tristan McNeil, with technical assistance from Sherry Larson. Special thanks to this episode to Robert Lamb, Joe McCormick, Dylan Fagan, and the inimitable Bob Purse. There's more information about everything you heard here online at

ephemeral dot show next time on ephemeral. What record collectors collected was stuff that had to do with the story of America country, blues, jazz, gospel, but the immigrants stuff, the ethnic stuff. The record collector is standing there in your living room with your grandparents records in his hand, and he hands them back to you and he goes, sorry, there's nothing here I can use really dollar apiece now, sorry, it's just I don't I don't think anybody wants these,

So then what happens to them? Will you throw them away? They're junk If that guy doesn't want them, nobody wants them. Visitors in the world Wide Web in interacribus and soulsial media at the former show for our podcast on IHAT media, use a Ironartradio Apple podcasts when we ever use a new favorite shows