My mom died Sunday, December 9th 2007, just shy of 1 AM.  I, and my father, found out around 2AM when Beth, a close friend to my mom, woke us up and took us to the hospital to see my mom.  When I got home I recorded this episode.

The approach I’ve been taking to podcasting has been a little bit on the experimental side..  I’m still sorta struggling to find my way to a mature vision so this episode is sorta exploring our way towards that:

I record stuff, put the stuff on my hard drive, and when I go to make a new episode, I take stuff from the growing collection of recordings on the hard drive.  

 From an aesthetic / philosophy of art sorta perspective I’m thinking in somewhat radical ways:  There’s this old idea of a recording as “a record.”  That is a recording as a record of an event, a recording having something to do with something that “actually happened.”  Modern sound production is not about creating “a record,” what you hear is “something manufactured.”  There’s a lot of implications to these two different ways of doing things.. which I’m always exploring..

Deep inside the subject of “a recording” is the idea that the microphone could be a kind of surrogate for Freud:  In classic psychoanalysis Freud sits you down on his coach and you talk..  and eventually we are able to peer into your soul, into the unconscious.  This is one of the ramifications of the “record” approach.

So here we have a recording, of where I was at, just a few short hours after my mom’s death:  Here we have a record of a psychological state.  

One thing, from an artist’s perspective, I find interesting about this recording is the difference between “in the moment,” when it was recorded versus “in reflection,” when editing.  In the moment you’re often thinking “I must make this worth listening to” and you have various judgments your making about the value of what you’re doing that is based on the perspective of the moment….

 I can tell you that 4 hours after my mom died I did not have a lot of perspective!  For about one or two weeks after my mom died I probably didn’t have anything going through my mind but dealing with my mom’s death.  Now that I have a little bit of psychological distance from the moment of the recording (though not really that much) I can see that it’s an intensely powerful recording / moment.  But in the moment I wasn’t even sure of the value of recording it.

I ended up not recording too much during that intense first week or so.. I have a recording made after the first wake:  My mom was big on going to the local 99.  I had always had a sort of snobby attitude towards the 99, didn’t like the food so much, and I guess I’m sorta… I don’t know.. the sort of people who go there aren’t really my people..  But the people who go to that 99 where the people who loved my mom, and so it was sort of an amazing experience to go there after the wake..  all of us sitting at the table.. all the toasts to my mom..  And I found myself feeling sorta attached to the 99 crowd…  

I’m not really sure how to wrap this sorta thing into the podcast, or even if I will, but I have it..  Something interesting to take a listen to. 

 

 MS Episode 11: A few Hours After My Mom Left [14:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 5th, 2008 at 7:28 am and is filed under Mom and Stuff, Music Production, The Matt Searles Podcast. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.