At long last: The brilliant Los Angeles-based radio artist Joe Frank finally has a podcast. A year ago today, I wrote a long post about Joe in which I talked about his amazing body of work and shared the news that he’d been sidelined by some major health problem whose details have not been disclosed. As I wrote last year, “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.” Read my June 2005 post for a lot more details. I think Joe Frank is simply one of the greatest American artists of the last two or three decades—in any medium.

According to reports on joefrank.com, Joe is still ill, but he’s recovering slowly and beginning to work on new shows. In the meantime, he finally has a podcast. As announced on his site last week, “Joe Frank podcasts have arrived! Twice a month, we’ll serve up either a one-hour show, or a couple of signature stories, or a half-hour show, and every now and then, some absurd extras.”

The first offering is an excellent hourlong show from 1997 called “The Other Side.” It’s a typically diverse Joe Frank episode: It opens with an actor (or is it an actor?) mangling a short passage from the Bible, then moves into an improvised phone dialogue between two actors. Later on are excerpts from a phone interview Joe conducted with an unidentified woman who is apparently a friend of his; she tells Joe about her doubts regarding her current relationship. (As he often does with his phone interviews, Joe cut out most of his side of the conversation, which gives the interviewee’s answers the flavor of a monologue.)

The rest of the episode consists of two classic Joe Frank monologues. The first is a paranoid, Raymond Chandler-ish tale of an office worker who is visited by a strange woman who forces him to accept a mysterious box. The second is a first-person story of a man who realizes, out of the blue, that he must leave his wife: He tells her calmly that he’s leaving her, then packs up his things, walks out the door, and checks into a hotel to begin a new life.

If you don’t want to listen to the entire show, you should at least listen to Joe’s two monologues—they begin at the 17:22 mark and the 46:52 mark. They’re fantastic. Otherwise, load the show onto your iPod, slip your earbuds into your ears, turn out the lights, and enjoy.

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.

[Continue reading "Joe Frank, Radio’s Brilliant Purveyor of Postmodern Noir, Has Been in the Hospital"...]

As a kid growing up in Bloomington, Indiana, I was creeped out by Jaws, Sleestaks, and a cheesy local public-access show called Haunted Indiana. As an adult, few things have given me the heebie-jeebies more than recordings of so-called numbers stations—mysterious shortwave radio stations that broadcast endless blocks of seemingly random numbers. Shortwave listeners around the world have been encountering these cryptic broadcasts for decades. As this site explains, “All available evidence indicates that some of these transmissions may be somehow connected to espionage activities.”

The sounds that emanate from these stations are mysterious and hypnotic and eerie. If you were to listen to them alone in a darkened room at 3 a.m.—not that I have, mind you—you might find yourself believing you’re listening to the voice of Death itself. Music groups such as Stereolab and Boards of Canada have used samples from numbers stations in their own recordings, and the director Cameron Crowe used some in his movie Vanilla Sky.

And now, the hook for this post: The British label Irdial-Discs recently rereleased its 1997 four-CD set of numbers station recordings, The Conet Project: Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations. Irdial’s main Conet Project page contains this description of the numbers station phenomenon and the questions it raises:

[Continue reading "The Conet Project"...]