SONOHR, Sanyo, Bern; audio diary feb. 2026
Last weekend i had the double fortune of not only attending the 16th SONOHR Radio & Podcast Festival, but hearing my work presented in the shorts program. Sanyo was a piece i made around this time last year with no real vision for where, when, or how it might be heard. i just wanted to make it and experiment with making it. it is a short about a rice cooker that has been in my family since i was very young, a gift from my grandparents that i became attached to and took with me to Berkeley, back to San Diego and then to New York, where it has followed me from apartment to apartment. itâs an appliance with real personality - I canât remember it ever looking new or working perfectly. Iâm grateful to Ivan and Celeste for helping inhabit it, and to my family for offering their memories about it. i did a short interview with Radio Bern about Sanyo (below). This post recaps a my three day trip to Bern and back for the festival.
overstimulated on zĂźrich airport tram 1
claire and i landed in ZĂźrich on Friday morning. we packed into a shuttle from the gate to customs, on which I experience sensory overload as a child wailed and the airport played an idyllic welcome message from Heidi overhead. another train ride took us to Bern, we dropped our bags at the hotel and checked off a few of the things that are on the Bern wikipedia page- the Zytlogge, Kindlirfresserbrunnen, a stroll through the old town. eventually we found our way to the park in the shadow of the Berner MĂźnster. it was 62 degrees farenheit, a temperature I have not felt in months. the park was full of people enjoying the sun - playing pĂŠtanque, meeting friends, drinking summery drinks. i wondered what the weather has been like in Bern recently, if everyone here was as starved for sunlight as I was. we sat for a while, then explored more. i took a recording of someone playing an instrument of the lute family in the plaza in front of the church.
lute like instrument in the platz 2
On Saturday morning, we took part in the âEar Lessonâ workshop led by Phoebe McIndoe oriented towards âobjects as gateways.â iâm very drawn to this line of thinking - physical and auditory tokens. i collect a lot of stuff off the ground, trying to find continuity between discarded things, traces of choice and chance. business cards, coat check tickets, sugar packets, matchbooks, coasters, stickers. audio is a way i think i can reciprocate this collection of âtakingâ with a collection of âgiving.â Sharing odd sounds that do or do not mean something to me, putting them back out into the world to be encountered here or hopefully elsewhere.
we began Phoebeâs workshop with a series of writing exercises to settle in and listen to ourselves. What is at the front of your mind right here, right now? and where does that lead? elsewhere in life, i often feel the need to resist my train of thought or force it in one direction or another. Phoebeâs âEar Lessonâ was about following rather than fighting thoughts. we ended the writing exercise by using our own words to construct a found poem, and then walked around a park with the goal of noticing what we were noticing. i sat for a while and sketched some graffiti while crows built nests in a big tree above me. i really appreciated the way Phoebe designed this workshop to create a collection of mementos - a page of writing, found objects, crafts connected to the process of finding.
crows building nests on saturday morning 3
Sanyo was one of ten international shorts selected, and one of four presented on Saturday. i chose a seat in the way back. my intention was to make some notes on the other pieces. ultimately i just kinda scratched some words that came to mind.
De ambulantes soy, by Vanessa Valencia Ramos and Gerardo Flores Hidalgo. direction. ambulante ambiente, passing by, blocks, movement measured by sound, altavoz, round trip sound, silbadas.
Sables, by Sam Cornu and Camille Protar. intimacy, familiarity, mental space. relation, proximity. questions and curiosity. silence, lingering, intrusion. explanation. nice synth.
My Fucking Diary, by Sarah Frosh. encounters. repetition, sentiment. spiral spiraling. self-constructive, hot shower, cold shower lukewarm shower. rejection liberation reflection repetition.
This was the first time something i have made has played in a theater environment, in a festival program, or in front of a room of entirely strangers. the theater sound system brought out textures in Sanyo that i didn't really know were there. i did find it moving to hear the voices of my family and friends in a place so far from home. it's interesting to hear where I was creatively this time last year. a lot has changed about how i approach this stuff since then, and i'd make this piece a lot differently if i were doing it today. it's nice to encounter where i was not too long ago, if a little nerve wracking to do so in a public presentation.
we stuck around Kino Rex until the âAscents and Descentsâ audio walk began. this was a nine-stop, self-directed audio walk that had been collectively produced the day prior. starting from the theater, we received open ended text prompts to guide our movement through the city. for example, âfind, a connection between two environments. Listen to the following piece while walking through the passage.â we started within a large group but quickly we were by ourselves. the pieces created for the audio walk narrated distinct times, distinct places, distinct observations of environments distinct but inherently related to ours. Claire and i were sharing a pair of headphones, so i had the audio walk in one ear and the sounds of the city in the other. it was really cool, but my phone ran out of battery around the seventh prompt. i took a couple recordings along the way. in particular, i liked this pairing, the first from my zoom recorder which picks up the city bells faintly in the background and the second from my tape recorder, a few minutes later and much closer.
bern bells, half past six or so 4
in the evening claire and i returned to the Berner MĂźnster for a choral concert. the pieces ranged from composition in the 1600s to 2025. we paid for the cheap seats with an obstructed view of the choir. in fact, our view was so obstructed that we were facing a different direction from almost everyone else in the church. luckily the acoustics were amazing. it was really cool to hear 500-year-old music in an 700-year-old church. the sustain on the notes was really unbelievable, at times i could feel it in the air. i recorded a bit of it. this is the world premiere of Dum Aurora by Ivo Antognini, recorded on a tape recorder tucked into the recesses of a church pew, at a perpendicular angle some 80 feet away from the choir, against a sandstone wall. one sound i wish i captured better was sound of the audience shifting in their chairs between pieces, letting out coughs and trying to find a comfortable spot on the hard wood pews.
tenebrae choir opening piece @ berner mĂźnster
Finally, the day wrapped up back at the theater with Pete Hazellâs âradio cabaret,â Radio Limbo, an absurdist live performance about the twin states of transmitting and receiving. Being âin limbo,â in this case, the surrealism of being reached by sound of unknown origin on its way to unknown destination. the 50-minute show presented a series of vignettes organized into a radio play dealing with folklore, mass communications, and âaudio plunder.â entering hour 50 or so of being awake and in transit, i was primed to enjoy this and surrendered pretty immediately to the experience. i loved the "found audio" feeling many of these pieces had, deriving inspiration from junky forms of radio communication. it brought to mind a soda advert i found on a tape i bought at a thrift store in philadelphia, which i will stick down below.
genny cream ad aired on WRTI, october 27, 1980
by late sunday afternoon, Claire and i were back in New York almost exactly 72 hours from stepping out of our apartment on thursday evening. it was a slightly delirious three days. while many parts of it were unforgettable, by the nature of the beast i have already forgotten a lot of it. i responded to SONOHRâs call for submissions last august, sitting in my parentâs car at 430 am while working on an audio project in San Diego. i rather forgot about it until they reached out to me and told me they wanted to present Sanyo in Bern. this yearâs festival was about âlistening beyond our horizons,â a space of complexity and a connecting line in which most everything fits. i, like many others in the United States, have experienced an incredible fatigue with the direction of our industry, which seems hell-bent on flattening interpretations of the medium that are concerned with tailoring audio uniquely, communicating ideas in forms that open dialogues with the ideas themselves. we're in a very one-size-fits-all state at the moment, but historically audio has always been a space of difference, and i feel that makes it a space in which some of our most unique and personal ideas can be transmitted. iâm grateful to SONOHR and everyone i met last weekend for that reminder.
The above excerpts are all part of my tape diary, the extended version can be heard below. ty for reading! bye bye ciao tchau ingats adios đ§
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