Broken Wrist Listening
I have broken my wrist! So this month, I’m taking a little easy because my normal format of interviewing someone is just a bit to labour intensive. And I...
Josh is a writer, artist, learning designer, lecturer, publisher, radio producer, and coach. This site is a 'kluge' of articles, interviews, experimental art and music, unusual ideas about life, and practical strategies for learning and working. If you like what you find here, please do get in touch. And please support this project with a donation or purchase.
Check out these articles, radio shows, and other threads:
Music w/ fireworks and vari-speed tape
Willows and Merriment is a new release of ‘tape’ music made over the span of 20 years between Toronto and Glasgow. These tracks were made with dictaphone / vari-speed...
What’s up with What Up with That?
The “What up with that” series of sketches with Kenan Thompson and friends is beyond funny. It’s a phantasmagoria, a braid of energy, a love potion. I don’t know,...
Howie Reeve on song, scenes, and oblique angles
This interview was recorded on a walk in Glasgow’s Pollok park. It might take your ear a minute to adjust. We discuss how Howie makes music, listen to some...
AI for Students 2nd ed.: Now launched!
In 2024, I wrote AI for Students to help students, educators, and parents figure out healthy and fun ways to use AI in learning. The book is in comic form, so...
Doug Tielli on mushing and meandering
Doug Tielli is a multi-instrumentalist improviser, songwriter, and composer. We discuss what improvisation is, some varieties of improvisational experience, what giving more time and space to making things is...
Defrag your brain
About two weeks ago, after giving notice at a stressful job, I decided to reorganize my relationship to technology and rediscover focus, attention and creativity. The job had left...
AI isn’t a tool, it’s an environment
Originally published in WONKHE Previously on Wonkhe, I argued for caution around the use of generative AI tools in education. Abstinence, however, is not something we can reasonably expect...
Nicole Rampersaud: strange sounds and 100 muscles
Listen to this interview with trumpeter, composer, and improviser Nicole Rampersaud. We discuss the 100 muscles it takes to play the trumpet, how not having shows can lead to...
Yang Chen’s skronk blang-blang
Percussionist Yang Chen interview: We discuss music-making as a social practice, how great percussion sounds, marching bands in Texas, shifting senses of time, and how a piece can go...
Do a colour walk
Here’s how you do a colour walk: go for a little walk and pay attention to a colour or a colour range. Reds. Blues. Any. Notice the light as...
AI Fatigue in Education
Originally published in WONKHE Raise the topic of AI in education for discussion these days and you can feel the collective groan in the room. Sometimes I even hear...
Marcus Boon part II
In this episode we catch up on some missed items from the previous interview with Marcus. We talk the politics of listening, being a musician, and doing long-form things...
Marcus Boon on time, the universe, Hennix, Nath, and DJ Screw
Writer Marcus Boon thinks unusual thoughts about music and time. We discuss his book, The Politics of Vibration: Music as a Cosmopolitical Practice. Our focus hovers around how long-form...
Annie Dunning, owls, and the infrathin
Annie Dunning, sound artist, discusses object and sound, interspecies encounters, owls, crows, toads, magpies, Chinese spouting bowls, Alvin Lucier, and Maryanne Amacher ‘s “third ear”. The episode begins with...
Chiyoko Szlavnics is all ears
Berlin-based composer Chiyoko Szlavnics and host Josh Thorpe discuss phenomenology, psychoacoustics, making music from pictures, and the wonderful experience of listening to, and playing, Indian dhrupad music. We listen...
Maria Chavez is a module
Maria Chavez, turntablist and sound artist, discusses her life as a DJ, getting kicked out of boys clubs, Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening, not listening, sound art, the moon, mentorship,...
Christof Migone: art, radio, burps, and farts
Christof Migone is a sound-artist working with language, voice, bodies, performance, intimacy, complicity, and endurance. We discuss teaching, radio, sound art, rhythm, sounds the body makes…and a typology of...
KMRU writes music on trains
Composer KMRU (aka Joseph Kamaru) joins host Josh Thorpe to discuss field recording, synthesis, and writing music on trains. We talk about process, listening, collaboration, fan reactions, and several...
Mariam Rezaei talks turntablism and gooeyness
Interview with Mariam Rezaei, turntablist, improviser, composer, and teacher. Rezaei speaks fascinatingly about free juggling, needle dripping, old time turntable experiments from the early 20th century, Lukas Koenig, Elvin...