HBM112: Negative Space

Here Be Monsters

Here Be Monsters Podcast

Science, Society & Culture, Social Sciences, Personal Journals, Documentary

4.6 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 13 February 2019

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Back when HBM host Jeff Emtman was a photographer, he used to solve his problems with walks in the woods. There, he’d see the ways that branches frame the sky. As an artistic concept, negative space gets hogged a lot by the visual arts. In this episode, Jeff attempts to wrestle the concept into the sonic world; address his current problems by listening to the spaces between words and by listening to the ambiences of a semi-empty, possibly haunted hotel.

Below are some excerpts from Jeff’s ~2011 photo series called Portraits without People and the original version of HBM021: Potential Energy…the version with words.

Producer: Jeff Emtman
Editor: Jeff Emtman
Music: The Black Spot

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	From KCRW, Mississippi Monsters.
0:15.0	Now, I've been feeling a little bit burnt out lately.
0:22.0	My 2019 has gotten off to a bit of a rough start and it's nothing that could have been planned.
0:27.6	It's just things that happened. It's a combination of personal, like body things like I threw out my back a couple weeks ago and I got really sick and also
0:41.4	I'm having a really hard time scheduling interviews, which is just something that happens at random from time to time.
0:47.0	You have good luck and you have bad luck with scheduling interviews, but you know, kind of all of these things in concert have come together in
0:55.6	in one period and it it eventually starts to affect my mental state I think it
1:00.6	would for anyone it It's just a natural
1:03.0	natural things when things aren't going according to plan. But I've been
1:07.3	thinking about other times in my life when I felt this way and it
1:10.8	reminds me a lot of how I felt in college quite frequently when things were piling up and I was thinking what did I do back then?
1:19.0	And what I'd usually do is I'd go for a walk in the woods.
1:24.0	There were these woods right next to my house
1:28.0	and I would go up into them and I would I would walk through the trees and I would I would look at the
1:35.3	plants and and I remember I was I was up there just once and the strangest thing
1:40.8	happened I I started looking at the trees and I started realizing that there
1:45.9	were spaces in between the trees through these shapes in between the branches that framed
1:50.5	to the sky in really interesting ways ways and this is a really simple
1:54.3	concept of course this is what is known in visual art as a negative space right
1:58.8	the spaces in between things and those shapes But what I didn't realize at the time was that a lot of the times my problems, the things that I see as being problems in my life, are kind of similar where they're problems because I'm
2:17.2	I'm looking at the trees and I'm not looking at what's around them what's
2:20.3	between them and what's behind behind them But back in college, I think I had grasped some semblance of this because I was a photographer back then and and I started a new photography
	...

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