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Overlooked: Ben Ratliff 3 (Audio)

Aug 23, 2018

The music critic Ben Ratliff recently prepared a half-hour mix called "The Sound of the Room" for BBC3 radio's experimental show "Late Junction.” Ben played recordings that convey the dimensions of the room in which the music took place, or of the arrangement of the musicians' bodies with respect to the microphone. This idea is not new—field recordings, single-microphone mixes, and experiments in "audio verité" have been around nearly as long as recorded sound. But in certain circumstances recorded music can transmit a strikingly direct sense of history, context, embodiment in time and place, and even accountability: all the things that digital technology, streaming media and the internet might be subtly erasing these days. For his third visit on WGXC’s Overlooked, Ratliff joins host Rob Saffer to pick up the same theme and travels further with it, including tracks from John Coltrane, Jelly Roll Morton, Susana Santos Silva, Tim Hecker, Retribution Body, and Baianas Mensageiras de Santa Luisa, among others.