Digging the Third Coast Festival

I’m freshly returned from the Third Coast Festival (along with Arthur) but these thoughts and impressions are my own. Fresh from the intensity -- and the partying -- of the week.

Please, do yourself a favor regardless of the format at your station; pledge to go to Third Coast next year. Put it in your budget. Take the most dangerous producer on your staff, the one who wants to do more and doesn’t ever seem happy enough.

Third Coast, if you don’t know, is something like a film festival for the ear.

• It is about the art of radio ---sessions on sound design (NOT journalism), mixing, audio techniques, the guts of working with audio.
• It is about the craft of radio –when and how to use first person on air, the range of what we think of as long form and documentary, the outer reaches of thinking about short form radio.
• And Third Coast is about emerging talent: from veteran producers in the US, Canada, Europe who have yet to peak---and young people (and teenagers) who are doing things with radio and sound that puts a lot of what we air to shame. When a person wins a Third Coast award for their second radio piece ever, that is a person worth meeting, like Katie Mingle. Check out more excerpts from the winners here.

We sat in a session with producer Joe Richman, Michelle Norris and a woman who survived Katrina who Michelle interviewed over the last year for ATC. They played tapes. They talked about what they did and how they did it. The art of radio. The intricacies of talking with someone over time about life-changing tragedy.

We heard from the woman who was the subject of the story about how she felt about the experience. She had never heard of NPR or public radio before. She and the producers revealed the intimacy of radio. People in the SRO hotel meeting room were crying, some weeping later in the ladies room. The power of radio reached out and grabbed you at every turn.

Outrageous producer Sean Cole lead sessions on how he inserts himself into stories. Challenging, controversial and laugh out loud funny. He doesn’t just do this..he has thought deeply about how to do this well. And he played funny audio about where it absolutely failed. Again, an SRO crowd.

I was struck again and again how much of this is on PRX and on the Third Coast site—how much of this audio EXISTS and how so little of this makes it to air at stations. Oh sure, you might hear this once on a network feed but rarely if ever again.

There is something powerful here that transcends formats and numbers and research. Peel all of that away and you get a medium that can reach out and engage and grab people. I think we forget how to get listeners enthralled about radio and the uniqueness of public radio.

Jay Allison played some of Father Cares, the documentary about Jonestown, and I had forgotten how chilling that was. Jim Jones’s overmodulated, screaming voice was alive in the room---the audio capturing the madness that lead his followers, lemming-like, to death. This isn’t old news. Jay referred to the hate radio of Rwanda and someone yelled out about the hate radio in the United States. The echo of madness is all around us. Who but public radio can put the present into a context that reaches the soul? Jay also quoted from this prescient 1932 essay by Bertolt Brecht about the potential of radio.

Memorable radio is not about journalism per se, or music or sports scores. It is about connection: the shared experience, the moments that we might only be able to share by listening.

Producers Kara Oehler and Ann Heppermann talked about how to use sound to recreate memories (quite an existential task). Sure, you could only talk to food writer Anthony Bourdain about his drug-infused teen years and how he lost his virginity. But the experience is more powerful than that: sound can create an accurate context (and Kara and Ann do their homework) that words alone don’t. You can hear what they did with Bourdain's tale.


Anyway—a long winded cheer for Third Coast. I think if we get people excited about the range of audio, the audience WILL follow. We offer connection. The ability to reach out and BACK through the speaker and headphones.

It was cool. Here are some photos.