New Release
The New Silence
Apr/18/20 13:57
A Poem for the Climate
This year is the 50th Earth Day, April 22nd. In commemoration of this event the HEAR Now Audio Fiction Festival presents an original poem for the climate. The New Silence is written and directed by Brian Price, of the Great Northern Audio Theatre. It features the voice talents of Dion Graham and Jane Oppenheimer, and an original musical score by Jason Kao Hwang. It was performed live at the 2019 HEAR Now Festival in Kansas City. The program includes the poem followed by commentary by the author and the performers.
It’s first broadcast is on Sound Affects: A Radio Playground, on KFAI Community Radio in Minneapolis, MN, Sunday, April 19, at 9:30 PM. (9:30 PM Sundays at KFAI.org.) The shows archives are kept for two weeks after the broadcast. It’s a meditation we hope you will enjoy.
Also on the Sound Affects program you can hear a related song, Greta, Put Your Boots On, with lyrics by Brian Price, music and performance by Mike Wheaton. (Available on YouTube) And there are three other short works by Brian, all with some connection to climate change – or perhaps a bit of culture change.
Wireless Theatre makes it all free
The UK-based Wireless Theatre Company has just changed their download model, and made everything available for FREE. I encourage you to try them out. Their production values are superior, with great acting, music and sound. They’re nice people, too. Some of them came in to town a few years ago when they won an Ogle Award for part of their Springheel’d Jack series. Short pieces long series, comedy and suspense – everything you want for good listening.
The Long and Short Of It
Apr/07/20 13:31
So Many Little Things…
The world has changed – a lot. Jerry has taken to pre-recording his Sound Affects: A Radio Playground shows for Sunday night broadcast. This gives him a chance to do some more adventurous things that can’t really be done live. He also gets in a little production practice, which is always a good thing. As for The Great Northern Audio Theatre, some of the larger projects that we have been working on have been put on hold, or shifted into slow motion for a while. We don’t know how long that might be. We have a number of related audio projects that we can do, and have been doing. So let us tell you about those.
Last Tuesday Podcast
Norman Corwin Award winner Marjorie Van Halteren produces the Last Tuesday Sound Art Podcast from her home in France. Silence Is Coming is an episode she and Brian Price created at a distance back in January of last year.
Safe Karaoke
Last July we wrote a piece for Tim Wick’s Big Fun Radio Funtime cast to perform at Convergence 2019. Brian and Jerry had this idea about when automation comes too close to entertainment, in this case Karaoke. Here is Practicing Safe Karaoke. And there is more free comic audio from Big Fun Radio Funtime, and other people we have worked with on our SideTracks page.
Earlid
Brian and his daughter, Eleanor have joined some very nice company with Earlid . They decided to try a different way to talk about the environment and climate change — get personal and get surreal. Eleanor plays the music on the piece, as well as performing some of the vocals. Earlid is “an online gallery of evolving exhibits of sound art”. Here is Vanishing.
Archives
Jerry was digging back into various archives and came up with a short poem scribed for a fanzine long ago. He had David Ossman read it for him, and then added some sounds to fill it out. It’s about the consequences of noise pollution. Please tune your ears to Listen! I Can’t Hear It Still, but don’t play it too loudly.
Bent Sunshine
Free Sound Effects
The entire catalog of sound effects in the BBC Sound Effects Library has now been posted online, in WAV format, for personal use. It has a very limited searchability, so you have to slog through them click by click; and there’s a LOT there, over 16,000 sounds. Remember, they are for personal or educational use only, you still have to license them for commercial productions.
Matthew Fecher, at AudioKit Pro has released a FREE set (over 800 loops) of Keyboard samples, recorded many years ago on Casio and Yamaha keyboards. Compared to today’s synthesizers and computer loops, they are just toys. But the vintage sound is fun and can be creatively useful. And they are Free to get and Royalty Free to use. So download the 490 MB zipped collection and see what you can do with them.
In The Embers
Jun/20/15 16:21
Independent Feature-length Audio release
Great Northern Audio is pleased to announce In The Embers, our new feature-length audio play which premiered at the HEAR Now Audio Fiction Festival in Kansas City last week. Stay tuned as we prepare several avenues for distribution of this exciting audio experience.
Urban archaeologist Digger Morgan has this new technique using a laser to read what’s embedded in the charcoal of a burned wooden post. He doesn’t expect to find voices. It’s two girls who were in the barn when the post was burned, and now he wants to know who they are. He also doesn’t expect it when one of those voices starts talking to him from his computer. Kit Jeffers was an up-and-coming jazz singer in the 1920s, and now she’s asking him just as many questions as he’s asking her. She’s smart, she’s sassy and saavy, and she wants to go home. Good science fiction, engaging characters, original music and terrific sound design make this well worth listening to.
A brand new audio play from Great Northern Audio, starring Robin Miles as Kit Jeffers, and Edwin Strout as Digger. With original songs by Brian Price and Mike Wheaton. Mixed at the ZBS studios in upstate New York, with Tom Lopez. CDs are available online currently through Uncle Hugo’s SF Bookstore and Dreamhaven Books.
“The story is excellent, the music is excellent, the audio quality is excellent, and so are the actors. This is a drama that goes in the permanent collection.” See this recent review of In The Embers by Scott Danielson of SFFaudio.com.
– – –
New Mark Time Awards
And while we were there at the HEAR Now Festival, we shared a Second Place Audience Favorite Award for the presentation of the new Mark Time Awards. Brian Price and Jerry Stearns played excerpts of this year’s winners in the mornng, and Judith Walcutt produced the Mark Time Awards presentation ceremony on Friday evening, with David Ossman doing the honors. See the Mark Time Awards website for a complete list. It was probably the kids from the Paseo Academy of Fine and Performing Arts, who wrote and performed their own work that won the audience over, though. So they really should have this award.
It was the first year for the new Nick Danger Prize for best detective/suspense audio theater, and we are sad to pass on that the real Nick Danger, Phil Austin of the Firesign Theatre, passed away on Thursday, June 18, just the day before the prize with his likeness on it was given out. Here’s the LA Times obituary.
Mark Time Radio Show 2011
Jan/02/12 11:46
Thwack That Dirigible
orDo You Want Fries With That?
Great Northern is proud to release the latest Mark Time Radio Show, live from Convergence 2011. It’s available as a download from the ZBS Catalog.
A stolen dream-driven dirigible, an evil steam-powered spider and a styrofoam grail, all have the fair dream mistress Princess Doyle a la Carte and the decidedly bubbly Count Pierre d'Orc on the run beyond the overtaxed capacity of their Heisenberg Hyper Extended Reversal Dream Drive.
Steampunk and other steam-like stuff take a bath in this latest Brian Price and Jerry Stearns satire. Featuring special appearances by The Tonight Show's Wally Wingert, Transylvania Television's Gordon Smuder and the Hungarian Dwarf Parade.