LULU MILLER: Hey, I'm Lulu Miller. So Radiolab, you know, we're a science show—tell science-y stories, or stories that don't seem science-y at first but then have a scientific question at their heart. But there's another element at the core of Radiolab, which is music.

LULU: The creator of this whole operation and original host, Jad Abumrad, was a musician before he was a journalist. And he took music and brought it into the DNA of the show. And that's still how we do it today. So this week we're gonna listen back to two pieces that Jad made about musicians—musicians he loves and uses on the show. These are both stories he made years ago, and what I really love about them is that they start deep in the music, purely about the music, but then each one unfurls into something more philosophical—about our relationship with technology, our relationships to ourselves. So here they are in an episode we are calling "Music Hat." Hope you enjoy!

[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Okay, so I'm gonna put on my music hat for a couple minutes.

ROBERT KRULWICH: Okay.

JAD: And then in two weeks we can put our other hats back on, whatever they're called.

ROBERT: Science-humanism whatever.

JAD: Philosophy, whatever. But look, we are many people.

ROBERT: We are many people.

JAD: I am a musician as well as a storyteller. You are a Broadway show tunes singer.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: As well as a radio raconteur.

ROBERT: I would like to have been a Broadway show tune—no one has ever invited me to do that.

JAD: Well, I'm gonna invite you at least to listen to my version of that.

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: For just a few minutes. I'm gonna tell you about a band that I just discovered. This may be the coolest thing I've heard in years. Actually, you know this band. I mean, maybe you don't know that you know them, but we've used them in a few shows. Remember the piece we did in the "Bliss" show about the perfect snowflake?

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: We used them there.

ROBERT: Oh.

JAD: Remember the story about the artist who weaponized his own blood?

ROBERT: Yes, Barton Benes.

JAD: We used them there, too.

ROBERT: So in a subtle way, I have already been exposed to them.

JAD: That's what I'm saying. Although I am quite certain you will hate their music.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: I could be wrong about that.

ROBERT: Well, I will be as generous as I possibly know how to be.

JAD: The band is called Dawn of Midi.

ROBERT: Dawn of what?

JAD: Of Midi.

ROBERT: M-I-D-I?

JAD: Mm-hmm. Do you know what Midi is?

ROBERT: No.

JAD: It's a—sort of like a computer language for music. Like, in my studio at home, I have a bunch of synthesizers and various things, they all talk to each other using Midi.

ROBERT: Oh, the Dawn of Midi.

JAD: Dawn of Midi.

ROBERT: It's one of those half and halfs. Like dawn suggests something pleasant, beautiful, and sort of movie-like.

JAD: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: Midi, technological, hard, cold.

JAD: Yeah, that's actually not a bad place to start.

JAD: Okay, so the band is three guys. Aakaash Israni, he plays the bass. Amino Belyamani plays the piano. Qasim Naqvi plays the drums. They met in college at CalArts. Initially, though, their partnership was not about music, it was about tennis, began on the tennis courts.

ROBERT: On the tennis courts.

AAKAASH ISRANI: Yeah, it was funny, actually, because we would play, like, late at night.

JAD: That's Aakaash, the bass player.

AAKAASH ISRANI: Qasim had, like, stolen the key and kept it or something, and one night we were there at, like, 3:00 am, and I think we were really drunk, and security showed up, and he saw us ...

JAD: They were pounding the ball back and forth, yelling.

AAKAASH ISRANI: And when he saw the intensity with which we were involved in this match, he was like, "You know, you guys should continue. Like, carry on." And he left!

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: And that intensity sort of translated into the music that they started to play—maybe not the competitive part, but they would take it really seriously. Like, what they would do is they'd get together ...

AAKAASH ISRANI: We'd go into these classrooms that had no windows and turn out all the lights.

JAD: And they would play these long crazy sets.

AAKAASH ISRANI: In pitch black darkness.

JAD: That was completely, totally, improvised. Like, before they started, they would have no idea what key they were gonna play in.

AAKAASH ISRANI: No.

JAD: No idea of what tempo.

AAKAASH ISRANI: No.

JAD: Or how long they were gonna go.

AAKAASH ISRANI: No.

JAD: Would you at least figure out who was gonna play first?

AAKAASH ISRANI: No.

ROBERT: You mean, they'd just start cold?

JAD: Cold. But it would end up sort of like that 3:00 am tennis match: really intense, rolling, rollicking improvisations. Kind of atonal.

ROBERT: Atonal. Oh boy.

JAD: I—yeah, I know. I know. I was just trying not to use that word.

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: [laughs]. It's really—I like it, it's really interesting stuff. And like I said, we used it in the snowflake story. But that's not—that style of music is not actually what I'm gonna present to you now.

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: It's what they do next that I find totally fascinating. To set that up, as they're out on tour doing this free improvisational thing, they were also listening to different kinds of music. Like, they were listening to electronic music as well. Stuff like Aphex Twin. Also, one of them gets really deep into trance music, not techno trance, but ...

AAKAASH ISRANI: A lot of music from Africa. West African music, as well as music from Morocco.

JAD: And these are musical traditions that have a totally different approach to rhythm, which we can talk about in a second. But they're listening to all this stuff, and it begins to somehow seep in. They begin to gradually put a little bit of it into their sets, and to make a long story short, over the course of two years ...

AAKAASH ISRANI: It was a very incremental and slow process.

JAD: ... they piece together this style of music that is 180 degrees from what they were just doing, and unlike anything I've ever heard. And the only way I can describe it is that it's sort of like ancient folk music filtered through highly obsessive computers that actually aren't computers, but people.

ROBERT: What does that mean?

JAD: Here, I'm gonna play you some, okay?

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: No, not that. Let's put this on. Let's just—wait, let's just mute this, and all right. Here it comes. Now keep an open mind.

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: So this is how it starts with just a bassline.

[solo bass]

ROBERT: Is it gonna develop? Or are we gonna just ...

JAD: No, it is, it is, but just slowly. Just wait, wait!

JAD: Hear that? Doo, doo ...

ROBERT: Right.

JAD: That's the pianist. He's playing it with his left hand on the strings, so he's kind of muting it to create a harmonic.

ROBERT: I know a pod of whales who would go crazy for this.

JAD: [laughs] The—just let—okay, you hear the drums are coming. Hear that?

ROBERT: Yes.

JAD: I don't know about you—actually maybe I do know about you.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: But for me, right about now, I'm getting into a deep trance.

ROBERT: I—let's—let's—don't say anything for a minute and let's see what happens.

JAD: All right.

[rhythmic music]

JAD: Listen to that.

ROBERT: They're not playing a machine, they're playing traditional instruments.

JAD: No, this is all live. They're playing real instruments.

ROBERT: This is all performed.

JAD: It's acoustic. Although it doesn't sound acoustic.

ROBERT: Yeah, it doesn't.

JAD: I am so addicted to this.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: Just listen some more.

JAD: See? It just starts to just slowly evolve.

ROBERT: A little bit.

JAD: Bit by bit. And it just keeps doing that for 45 minutes. I mean, it has—it's broken into tracks, but it's really just one really long thing.

ROBERT: I think that in seismic laboratories all over the world, where geologists gather ...

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: People who have to listen to impending earthquakes, this is gonna be, like, enormous.

JAD: In the Krulwich household too, I imagine.

ROBERT: Because it's small, small shifts.

JAD: Tiny, tiny shifts. Come on, you don't find that groovy at all?

ROBERT: No, I do. Actually, I do.

JAD: So these guys basically went from like free improv, no rules, to becoming like human machines.

ROBERT: It's sort of like wishing to be an element in a very finely made Swiss watch.

JAD: Except now remove the watch.

ROBERT: Huh.

AAKAASH ISRANI: I think that something is going on in the world right now.

JAD: That's Aakaash again.

AAKAASH ISRANI: The last 10 to 15 years, you see it in a lot of fields right now. People doing things, quote-unquote, "In an analog way," that, 10 years ago, would have been assumed were absolutely, like, impossible without the aid of technology. You see it from big wave surfers who have found out that they could ride huge waves if they have jet skis to pull them into these waves.

JAD: Mm-hmm.

AAKAASH ISRANI: To now they're saying, "Hey wait a minute, we can catch these with our arms again." But the jet ski needed to be there to show them that this was even possible. And you see it with this—this French beatboxer video online.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: beatbox video]

AAKAASH ISRANI: He's doing his own thing that just sounds impossible. He's—it's unbelievable.

JAD: Hmm.

AAKAASH ISRANI: And it's something that, like, the kind of stuff that Aphex was programming for his music, but this guy's doing it with his mouth. And it's like, the computer showed us a world of possibility, and now we're sort of almost realizing that that world was inherent to us and not the machine.

JAD: Huh. So you're talking about like a reclaiming.

AAKAASH ISRANI: Yeah, absolutely. And it was, like, almost like we didn't know how far the biotech of our minds could go until the machines sort of showed us that, hey, wait a minute, like, this is—this is coming from you guys.

ROBERT: You know what it is is if you just let it do what it's doing, and have none of the usual expectations of resolution, or ...

JAD: Or, like, that usual arc.

ROBERT: It's not gonna tell you a story, it's just gonna keep you company. That's what's happening here.

JAD: Yeah. I mean, I think what it's trying to do is to get you into a different state of mind. Like, a different state of time.

AAKAASH ISRANI: That experience of time that is non-narrative.

JAD: Where you're sort of existing in time, not in a sort of regular story way, where everything leads to the next thing, beginning, middle, and end. Something else.

AAKAASH ISRANI: What Amino and I often talk about is the idea of quantum states of time.

JAD: And I think what he means—what I take it to mean, is something very ancient, in a way. Like, you know how I mentioned that they were listening to West African and Moroccan trance music?

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: What you have in a lot of that music are these vertical stacks of rhythms. Like, almost multiple time flows existing simultaneously in the same moment. And if you're listening to this music that we're hearing right now?

ROBERT: Yes

JAD: And you're trying to pick out, "Okay, what's the bass doing? What's the drums doing? What's the piano doing?" You will hear that they're actually almost not fitting together. Like they're—they're playing different beats.

ROBERT: Huh.

JAD: Pulling at each other.

ROBERT: Hmm.

JAD: In some sense. If I listen in and try and pick out all the lines, I get lost in the intricacies of their rhythms. If I listen out, I can just nod my head to it for 45 minutes. But if I listen in, I'm like, "Jesus, God, what is the bass player doing? I have no idea what beat he's on."

ROBERT: That is cool.

JAD: And that's just interesting to me, the way that the patterns on the interior are—just kind of mess with your ear, because they all seem to be on their own cycle, falling in and out of phase. But then when you pull out and just listen to the whole thing together, you're like, "Oh, yeah! I can nod my head to this. I can nod to this."

ROBERT: So actually—I don't know if you're familiar with Mark Rothko's paintings.

JAD: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: Those, like, sort of squares of color that sit one on top of the other

JAD: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: I have the same—I'll go—there's a Rothko chapel in Houston.

JAD: Yeah, one of the most amazing places.

ROBERT: Yeah. Because he would often take a sponge and then dip it in the color and then very lightly dab.

JAD: Like, over and over and over.

ROBERT: So it's very, very layered. And when I look closely, I see patterns within patterns within patterns within patterns. And I get feelings from the patterns.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: And I find myself sort of telling stories about the feelings that I'm having. And then I'll pull myself out, and I'll see three rather richly tonal blocks of color. Big picture. Then little picture again.

JAD: Yeah, totally.

ROBERT: And it's the same thing you're describing.

JAD: Yeah, I like that phrase. "Feelings from the patterns." That makes sense to me.

JAD: And these patterns, to me they feel kind of ancient and new at the same time. Super mechanical, and yet deeply human at the same time. It never quite resolves for me somehow.

LULU: You can find out more about Dawn of Midi on their website, DawnofMidi.com. After the break, we have one more exploration of music. Stay with us.

JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm busy listening to this. Who is this? I'm Robert Krulwich. This is Radiolab, the podcast.

JAD: So this person that you're hearing right now?

ROBERT: Mm-hmm?

JAD: Testing. Testing.

JAD: She's one of my favorite, favorite musicians.

JAD: Do you want to introduce yourself? My name is—I am ...

JAD: Her name's Juana Molina.

JUANA MOLINA: I'm Juana Molina, and I'm a musician. I hope you enjoy what I do.

JAD: Okay, so you know how sometimes on this podcast, instead of the science and the big ideas and the whatever, we present musicians?

ROBERT: Yeah?

JAD: Well, that's what I want to do for the next 10 or so minutes. Mostly because I think she's amazing, but also because when we used her music in the "Sperm" show—I used it for some of the breaks—this song right here, in fact—we had a flood of emails, people asking about it.

ROBERT: I wonder what she thought about being the breaks in the sperm show. [laughs]

JAD: [laughs]

JAD: She—she doesn't know!

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: So this podcast is for the bunch and bunch and bunch of people who wrote in asking about Juana Molina. And also for the rest of you who maybe don't know her yet but will hear her now, and maybe, I hope, fall in love with her music as I have.

JAD: So let me make space here.

JAD: Okay, so I spoke with her recently. She was in town to play a gig at this club called Le Poisson Rouge.

ROBERT: Le Poisson Rouge. The red fish.

JAD: Yep. And she told me her backstory. It's kind of interesting. She started out as a musician, taking piano lessons and guitar lessons, trying to be a performer. It wasn't really working out at that point, so she needed a job. And she wasn't really sure what to do, but she knew she was always good at impressions.

JUANA MOLINA: It's something I could always do. And it was easy for me just to impersonate characters. And then ...

JAD: People that you knew, or just ...

JUANA MOLINA: People—like stereotypes. Or I don't know if it's stereotypes or archetypes. Both. I mean ...

JAD: That's interesting sounding.

JUANA MOLINA: Yeah. And then one day I was looking for a job that gave me enough money to play music. And I thought TV was the best option.

JAD: You went to TV to help pay for music?

JUANA MOLINA: Mm-hmm.

JAD: What she did was she went over to the local TV station, somehow convinced them to give her a job reporting fake news, sort of like The Daily Show. And eventually, she got her own show called Juana y sus Hermanas, which means Juana and her Sisters. It was sort of a comedy show.

JUANA MOLINA: It was just sketches.

JAD: How long did that go for?

JUANA MOLINA: Three years. At the beginning, it worked very well because I had money, and I could pay my rent and my guitar lessons. But then I got big.

JAD: She became a huge hit.

JAD: Was it the kind of situation where you'd walk down the street and be recognized?

JUANA MOLINA: Yeah.

JAD: Much to her dismay, oddly. Suddenly, she was an actress, not a musician. And as she puts it, her life kind of got out of hand. But then she got pregnant.

JUANA MOLINA: I got pregnant, and I needed to stay in bed. And so I had time to think about my life, and realized that I had totally missed my goal. It was just that I didn't want to miss it. I didn't want to die and not having done what I wanted to do.

JAD: So at the height of her popularity as an actress, she drops out.

JUANA MOLINA: Yeah, that's not what I wanted. I just wanted to be a musician.

JAD: So she starts playing in these little clubs, just her and her guitar.

JAD: How did people respond?

JUANA MOLINA: Badly.

JAD: Didn't go so well.

JUANA MOLINA: It was hell for several years.

JAD: She said she had terrible stage fright.

JAD: You're an actress. Wouldn't you be fine to be on stage?

JUANA MOLINA: It's not the same. You're acting. It's not you.

JAD: I suppose that's true, but I mean you're used to having ...

JUANA MOLINA: You don't suppose. You know. What I was doing is to impersonate people, and I was making fun of people. It was never myself, and it was hard because it was—I don't know, I was just very scared.

JAD: So what she ended up doing was kind of going solo. You know, like, she tried to play with musicians.

JUANA MOLINA: And I didn't like anyone, and they didn't like what I was offering them either.

JAD: So essentially what she does now is she creates entire symphonies of just her. Just her, her guitar, some electronics and this looping box. She'll play a line, and then it'll loop and loop and loop, and then another line, and then a loop and loop, and they'll both be going. And then she'll add a third and a fourth and a fifth, and somewhere along the way—and this is what I love—as you're listening, you slip into this universe of Juana.

JUANA MOLINA: The thing by being on your own is that you can go deeper and deeper and deeper in your own universe, and go further, further away or deeper, deeper, deeper inside.

JAD: Now do you, when you loop yourself and you're in the middle of, like, let's say, an avalanche of Juana Molinas, are singing and harmonizing, are they the same person?

JUANA MOLINA: I usually feel that the sounds tell me what to do with them. Every sound has its own behavior, at least for me. I'm just feeling like a driver of the sound.

ROBERT: It's so interesting. Like this, it feels like she's taking a bath in herself.

JUANA MOLINA: Little by little, my ridiculously small universe, it becomes huge. Anything that has a note or a rhythm, you can make music with.

JAD: Are you inspired more by a thought? Like I want to say something or ...

JUANA MOLINA: No.

JAD: No.

JUANA MOLINA: Never. There's absolutely nothing that I really want to say.

JAD: Really?

JUANA MOLINA: Really.

JAD: I mean, you have lyrics sometimes.

JUANA MOLINA: Most of the time.

JAD: So when a song pops into your head and you develop it, you're not thinking of a story, per se?

JUANA MOLINA: No, never.

JAD: But you put the story on afterwards. Why?

JUANA MOLINA: In order to be able to sing.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, "Un Dia": One day, one day, one day, one day.]

JAD: "Un Dia," the song. How did that—how did that happen?

JUANA MOLINA: I was warming up for a show and I started—I got bored and I started to play, di do di do di do di do, and it sounded like "one day." It wasn't saying one day, but it sounded like.

JAD: You didn't even have the words just yet.

JUANA MOLINA: No, but then when I was singing ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, "Un Dia": Un día voy a ser otra distinta.]

JUANA MOLINA: ... that just came out. "Un día voy a ser otra distinta." One day I will be someone different. So from that sentence, I could already have the whole song.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, "Un Dia": One day, one day, one day, one day.]

JUANA MOLINA: One day I will be someone different. I'll do everything I never dared to do before. I will live in the middle of the country and I will dance, dance, dance, and only dance. One day I will fix the back door, and one day I will write songs with no lyrics so everybody just can imagine whatever they want.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, "Un Dia": One day, one day, one day, one day.]

JAD: You want to know something crazy? I heard that song, and I got the sense immediately of what it was without knowing the words. Just the sense of, like, a chant to your better self. You once called it, like, the chorus of one. Remember that?

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: The thing you say to yourself when you're feeling really crappy. Well, I had that feeling from this song. So I got on her website, JuanaMolina.com, and the only fan letter I've ever written in my entire life was to her. And I emailed her and I was like, "I really love this song. I love your music. And can I remix it?"

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: And amazingly, her manager wrote me back. "Totally, you can remix it."

ROBERT: Really?

JAD: Yeah. He sent me a DVD of all of the different parts of the song—and you can hear there's like a bazillion parts here. So I remixed the song.

ROBERT: Oh, my God! Was—was this guy—was this guy in Buenos Aires or was—where was he?

JAD: No, it turns out he's just down the street. He was in New York.

ROBERT: Can we hear your version?

JAD: Yeah. How can I do that? I know how I can do it. Okay, hold on one second. I'll go run over and I'll play it for you. Okay, I've got it right here. Okay, so here it is. Here's a short excerpt from a remix that her manager was nice enough to let me do of her song, of Juana Molina's song, "Un Dia."

[Un Dia remix]

JAD: Okay, I want to thank Paul Dalen and Juana Molina. You can also go to JuanaMolina.com, check out her music. And I want to thank Michael Rayfield for some of the sounds used in that remix, as well as Stuart Dempsey for some of the music. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: And I'm Robert Krulwich.

LULU: I'm Lulu Miller. And, you know, since we are in a music mode, I just wanted to tell you about a favorite show right here on our home station, WNYC, called New Sounds. They have been on the air for decades, and their small team of John Schaefer and Caryn Havlik comb through music released from all over the world to bring you such a delightful and eclectic mix of musical goodies just like Juana Molina or Dawn of Midi, that kind of stuff. So if you want something on in the background to unwind to, to refresh your repertoire while you cook or run or I don't know, contemplate some profound mathematical theory, I highly recommend you check them out. And here's a little sample of their vibe. Here's one of their promos.

JOHN SCHAEFER: In a world full of algorithms, we often miss the element of surprise, especially with music. New Sounds is all about bringing you the music you didn't even know you needed.

LULU: If you're in New York, you can listen old-school live on the radio on 93.9 every weeknight at 11:00pm. Or you can find tons of episodes online at WNYC.org/shows/newsounds.

LULU: See you next week for a story where music quietly returns to the background. Thanks for listening.

[LISTENER: Hi. I'm Victor from Springfield, Missouri, and here are the staff credits. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad, and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Sarah Qari, Sarah Sandbach, Anisa Vietze, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters, Molly Webster and Jessica Yung. With help from Rebecca Rand. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Anna Pujol-Mazini and Natalie Middleton.]

[LISTENER: Hi, I'm Jerry and I'm calling from Kapsowar, Kenya. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.]

 

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