Joan Schuman • Audio Artist : Audiophilia/Audio

Ligature (18:50)
A whispered conversation savored between conjoined twins drapes the bed sheets and the surf's edge; but there's a ghosted imprint of mourning of those attached to us, whether by our own sinew or the withered wings of dead seabirds.

This Beautiful Carcass (11:49)
On a desolate beach in Northern California's Humboldt County, a marine biologist and a citizen scientist troll for bird carcasses, inadvertently finding beauty and, perhaps, answers about the ocean's warming waters.

Cicatrix (2:51)
Resonating in regenerative acts, resiliency, rootedness and irreparable scars, a jumble of voices makes sense of the language of war.

Travels in Stasis (33:51) A multiple trek follows the nomad's movements around walled cities and deserts reaching the sea; through the uprooted mind; via ghost travels and in bad circles; inside stories that never come to the point.

Nomad (5:08) - Listens to the ubiquitous freights rumbling past a desert neighborhood.
Ghost (1:05) - Dangles ethereally on a jangling key ring.
Exile (22:39) - Evokes the weariness of living in a series of waterless cities.
Memory (1:33) - Wonders who remembers best.
Walking (3:26) - Wanders a maze of bad circles far from a tiny Mexican village.

Taboo Box (14:47)
A boundary must not be regarded as a limit to be transgressed but to be traversed.
(Gilles Deleuze)
Dream tales slip inside betrayal stories, stutters next to someone desperately trying to escape boxed-in boundaries, as the flesh washes off in a torrential grey rain.

Residence Elsewhere (11:04)
"Should I stay or should I go now...?" Urban nomads parse the answer. A 30-minute version was commissioned for Chicago Public Radio's Chicago Matters series.

Speech Acts (27:03)
A bound and gagged voice asks three questions about the loss of language; the nosy neighbor of Echo and Narcissus offers her opinions about the doomed pair; and a couple remembers their first year of marriage when one of them practiced monastic silence.

Bound (2:42)
Echo (9:48)
Gagged (1:01)
Silence (12:20)
Stutter (1:12)

Radio~Sound~Art (6:07)
A primer on radio artistry features the ideas of U.S. radio-sound-makers Terry Kapsalis, John Corbett, Carol Genetti, Eric Leonardson, Lisa Kucharski and Joan Schuman.

Unbecoming Woman (22:49)
Becoming or living as men, three stories are layered amidst a potentially true ballad voiced by a 16th-century woman-man.This amalgam of voices and aural metaphors ensounds the nature of hermaprodism, transgendered bodies, ambiguity and ambivalence.

Micro-Texts
Short audio sketches sample the cultural impact of technology. Produced weekly in the last months of 2000 for the PRI-distributed radio program, Beyond Computers.

Environment (1:59) - A view of the ocean from the tiny screen yields a foggy moment of nostalgia
Food (2:00) - An urban myth pits chicken against man, technology against nature.
Freedom (2:05) - Technocrats offer a plethora of winners.
Memories (2:00) - A perfumed epistolary in times of high technology.
Vision (2:00) - Pop the video pill and find out what scientists are watching on the big screen.

Hyperacousia (11:28)
A passion for eavesdropping crosses wires with a desire to speak with the long-dead radio madman, Antonin Artaud. Originally produced as a 22-channel gallery installation.

Plausible Narration
And you treat the next book like a box contained in the first or containing it. And you annotate and interpret and question and write a book about the book. And so on. (Deleuze & Guattari)
A saturated weaving of pilfered poetics and philosophies about the resistance to structured stories and the materiality of the book. Shuffle the pages and listen randomly.

Page 1 (:48)
Page 2 (:25)
Page 3 (:38)
Page 4 (:19)

Page 5 (:40)
Page 6 (:24)
Page 7 (:29)
Page 8 (:24)

Page 9 (:24)
Page 10 (:36)
Page 11 (:27)
Page 12 (:21)

Complicité (11:37)
Why would I? She was my wife, the love of my life. (Louis Althusser)
A philosopher-murderer benignly recalls his accidental strangulation of his adoring wife; an analyst makes excuses for a violent client; an obsessed reader stumbles over her passion for true crime fiction.

Think Tank (7:38)
Portrait of iconoclast artist and self-appointed philosopher Mat Bevel, aka Ned Schaper, who creates gizmo-laden, kinetic sculptures made from things people toss in the trash, and then enlists them to perform musical cabarets called Bevelvision.

Skin Stories (1:30)
An itchy, destructive and finally proud relationship to one's skin.

{audiophilia} {abstractions} {aesthethics} {accomplices} {afterword}

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