Audio
Making It Slowly
Conversations with people who work in decades, recorded in their workshops rather than a studio.
A stonemason said something to me in 2021 that I could not fit into an essay, and I wanted the sound of the yard around it. We recorded the first episode in a stone outbuilding with no power, running the microphone off a car battery.
The problem
Interviewing someone at interview speed produces interview answers. People who work in decades do not think in three-minute segments, and if you ask them to, you get the version they have already given four times.
What we did
The method took about six episodes to find, and it is mostly about not asking anything:
- Arrive an hour early and ask nothing for the first hour.
- Record in the workshop, with whatever the workshop is doing.
- One question every guest gets: what would you do differently with forty more years?
What came of it
Fourteen episodes, and the longest silence I have ever left in a published edit is forty seconds. That episode is the one people write to me about.
The compressor two doors down is not a production problem. It is the point.
