Customer Reviews

Best of NPR's Lost and Found Sound Vol. 1

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Quirky - odd - historical - rich - multi layered - surprising - intimate - sweet - intriguing......are words that come to mind when I listened to this collection of stories. Cigar Stories was incredible! Tennesse Williams - fun, funny, compelling - Someone recording the sound of Aurora borelais? how bizarre ! how fantastic ! The pitchmen in Carnival Talkers... LBJ and the helium filled astronaut ! - The Gettysburg eyewitness account... I found this a most amazing collection. Beautifully produced stories - great listening

Releases of this type always have to stand up to the "repeated listening" test, and this one certainly does. Lots of compelling stuff here to keep you coming back from time to time. Fans of this CD/radio series ought to seek out a couple similar releases from a few years back called "Lucas & Friends Discover A World Of Sounds" and "One Of One: Snapshots In Sound," both of which artfully document the world of home-made audio recordings, as found in thrift stores and garage sales.

From beginning to finish
I was struck by its simplicity and familiarity.
Heartbreaking voice of a little girl who will not live to reach adulthood.

The everyday neighborhood sounds brought back my own childhood.
The song by the 'coal girl' incredibly beautiful.
The role cigar workers played in employment improvements by having been read to while working by the literate and knowledgeable among them. Well done. A masterpiece.

I love this cassette and would not part with it for any price.
I found it in a local 'Dollar' Store.
I've gone online only looking for Volume two?

This is a great idea, and I think it's fairly well done. But to be honest, most of the CD is not the "lost and found sound" itself; rather, it's people talking about the lost and found sound. For example, one of the longer pieces is about people who used to entertain cigar-wrappers in Cuba all day by talking. Well, you get maybe a few snippets of this, and we don't even know if it's authentic or recreated! And the piece goes on and on with interviews from people whose relatives either worked in the factories or who knew the folks who actually did the talking. But lost and found sound? Not much.

The biggest disappointment for me is a recording of the man who claimed to have been at Lincoln's Gettsyburg Address. While there's every reason to suspect that he actually was there, in the recording he is clearly reading from a script, which destroys any sense of authenticity. Of course, that's not the producers' fault, but it was anticlimactic for me.

The best sound for me was the opening theme, featuring clarinetist Jimmy Giuffrie improvising while a woman walks back and forth in high heels in a New York lobby. Very unique and compelling.

But I agree with a previous critic; often it's hard to tell whether what you're listening to is authentic or recreated. My guess is that if the sound is not introduced as authentic, it was recreated or came out of a stock library. This is a common NPR folly: to over-produce segments for the dramatic aspect. Yeah, it's show business, but this disc is supposed to be about real life.

NPR's "Lost and found sound" features a robot voice, droning narratives, and strange fade-in/fade-out effects. And then there are the lost and found recordings themselves, none of them the type of audio artifact the majority of humans would find in their attic, basement, disc storage box, or the like. This is the collection's first cheat--that there is hardly any of the vernacular focus promised by the tone of the project. The second cheat is that the majority of recordings are presented in snippets, with voice-overs, or side by side with NPR's library of annoying effects (pounding, syncopated percussion and the like), so that the listener cannot always tell what is fabricated and what is authentic. Not that it matters much, because few of the artifacts are very compelling, save for an account of the Gettysburg Address read by an eye- and ear-witness and a fragment of an Edison recording that I hope I have the chance to hear sometime. Noah Adam's narration (the robot voice mentioned above) lacks the warmth of an average weather-cube forecast, and the various civilian (non-NPR) narrators are allowed to push the art of redundancy to its limit. "People talking about lost and found recordings" would have been a more accurate title, overall. Personally, I would feel royally taken in had I been one of the probably many people who answered NPR's call for home recordings, only to find that the vast majority of offerings never had a chance of being considered in the first place. "Audio snapshots" from the periphery of everyday experience hardly offer much of a picture of the previous century.