Record Everything shares some of the qualities of Amy Skjerseth’s Catching Flies and Catching Memories in its resemblance to the academic conference talk. Indeed, the piece was presented with fanfare live at a 2018 meeting of the Great Lakes Association for Sound Studies (GLASS), with Morris intertwining the reading of a paper with the triggering of audio clips in a Digital Audio Workstation onscreen. Audiographic practice will surely continue along this line of development, moving into a domain adjacent to live electronic music, with illustrative audio clips looped and triggered in real time, and interaction with a co-present audience expanding upon the conventional “question and answer” session.

Also notable here is the use of a fictional audio drama to structure passages of critical analysis on issues of podcast preservation from early podcasts like 2004’s The Daily Source Code to the more elaborate shows of today. Rather than simply use pieces of Archive 81 as examples -- or worse, as wallpaper -- Record Everything seems to inhabit the podcast as a symbiotic species, something the piece reminds us of repeatedly whenever Morris’s narration speaks in chorus with dialogue fragments from the podcasts and radio shows he describes. Something very similar can be found on Jacob Smith’s 2019 ESC audiographic project, which uses episodes of the classic radio series Escape to structure ten critical analyses that expose for the first time how dense Escape is with mid-century histories of toxicity, a matter of special importance to the expanding field of historical approaches to eco-critical thought (Smith 2019).

In their symbiotic use of Archive 81, Morris and Welch also trouble the boundary between fiction and nonfiction, suggesting a methodological problem (and opportunity) for audiographers who wish to pursue similar work to address. It is a form that seems particularly geared to critically attending to narrative audio material, and to pull it off as well as Morris and Welch do requires training in editing, access to DAWs, recording equipment and high-quality rights-free music, among other things. Although work would need to be done to make this form more technically accessible and more ecumenical when it comes to possible research topics, of all the experiments in this issue of [In]Transition, Record Everything may be the closest thing we have to a handy model in the sense that with time and dedication it is highly emulatable, and many scholars can no doubt find ways to use recording to play with the plastic space between primary material and scholarly practice. In doing so, scholars may, like Morris and Welch end up with something like Record Everything, a podcast in its own right, and one worthy of preservation.

Work Cited

Smith, Jacob. 2019. ESC: Sonic Adventure in the Anthropocene. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.