"Audiographs: Songs from the Tenderloin" (1987) by Earwax Productions and produced by Barney Jones, Marcos Kounilakis, and Jim McKee
Condensed and dramatized portraits of people living on the streets of San Francisco. Recorded interviews form the basis of this work, but interviews set in alternating environments: in the street and within a musical score. In the music, the edited and repeated voices become part of the rhythm: recurring beats that intensify the toughness and tenderness of the people's reflections— the pain, humor, and ethics that govern their lives. Commissioned by New American Radio.

"Wake for Tom" (1991) by Earwax Productions and produced by Barney Jones and Jim McKee
A follow-up on "Audiographs: Songs from the Tenderloin" created in 1987. Using the techniques developed for the earlier work, "Wake for Tom" takes interviews with people living on the streets of San Francisco and sets them in alternating environments: in the street and within a musical score. It explores the lives of the same close-knit group of alcoholic panhandlers. Many have died in the intervening four years, including Tom Scanlon, one of the principal voices in the earlier work. Interviews with him made just before his death are intercut with interviews with his friends and with the professionals whose job it is to deal with the death of indigents. A moving continuation of a sad, humorous, and virtually untold story about America's homeless.

In its ten years as a weekly national series, 1987-1998, New American Radio (NAR) commissioned and distributed over 300 original works: conceptual new drama, associational documentary, language explorations, sonic meditations, environmental compositions, musical explorations and works that pioneer new dimensions in acoustic space. Wave Farm is thrilled to be partnering with New American Radio to ensure these works remain available to listeners today and into the future.

New American Radio was organized by Helen Thorington, Executive Producer and Regine Beyer, Associate Producer. A special thanks to both Helen Thorington and Jo-Anne Green for their generous support and collaboration of this partnership, and their contribution to the field at large!

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