The great Los Angeles-based radio artist Joe Frank has been struggling with health problems over the last few months.
If you’ve never heard of him, Joe is a completely original American storyteller whose shows have pioneered new forms of radio narrative over the last two decades. I’m most obsessed with his monologues, which are usually accompanied by eerie looped music, but his shows often incorporate other formats, including taped phone conversations, found sound, and improvised radio plays that Joe records with actors and then imposes a structure on in the editing room.
Joe’s work might best be described as a cross between Kafka, Nietzsche, Raymond Chandler, Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, and David Sedaris. He’s a short-story writer, a philosopher, a comedian, a raconteur, and one of the greatest-ever purveyors of the postmodern-noir sensibility. He’s spent his career grappling with all the grand topics: sex, love, morality, lust, greed, sin, fear, hatred, the search for meaning. Much of his best work is both utterly profound and completely hilarious. He often blurs the lines between real life and fiction, and his shows are sometimes explicitly about the creative process. At his core, he’s a tortured man who attempts to make sense of the world by telling stories about it. There is simply no one else like him. Can you tell that I’m completely obsessed?
And I have yet to even mention his voice, which is incredibly rich and expressive and spellbinding.
Much more about Joe after the jump, including details about his health, links to some of his work, and other info.
posted by Andrew Hearst • permalink
categories: Best Of, Music and Audio
