ABC RN
Easy Love
There’s so much to admire about Easy Love – the whimsical beginning, the evocative music, the precise measure of the ambient recordings and acoustic textures, the circular structure…but most of all, I want you to focus on producer Jaye Kranz’s narration style. It’s unintrusive, concise, and the tone is pitched just so. Jaye’s confidence in her craft makes this story feel effortless, but I know a lot of thinking went into making this sound so organically elegant. And if you need evidence of this, just peruse Jaye’s Behind the Scenes interview with Third Coast Audio Festival in Chicago.
(Photo by Warren Kirk)
Tokyo's Burning
Tony Barrell, who died in 2011, contributed a distinctive voice to Australian radio. He subverted norms of realist documentary by fusing pop culture with serious political analysis, for example. But of his vast back catalogue, I’ve chosen to feature Tokyo’s Burning – a more conventional documentary about the WWII firebombing of Tokyo – in the hopes that it will be canonised as a 'classic'.
This feature combines factual exposition in the form of witness accounts and reportage, blended with a haunting soundscape created by Russell Stapleton. The voices float above a persistent drone, signalling impending doom, demonstrating that sound design is not just 'decoration' or to oil the wheels of the narrative, but rather, conveys meaning. Everything in a sound-rich story is 'information', even, or perhaps especially, silence. This documentary won the Oscars of radio, the Prix Italia in 1995.