“Periodic Triumphs” is a three-minute audio story about an office building and the things inside it. (It’s also the first original audio piece that I have published in years!) I made it for the short-form audio storytelling project Audio Flux, which asks people to create pieces in response to a set of constraints and creative guidelines. There’s a lot more I have to say about it below, but if you have 180 seconds, have a listen:
a transcript is available here
I think of Audio Flux as a magazine or journal: the editors post prompts (which they group into “circuits”), people submit their little stories, and then a handful are chosen for publication. In a world where it is becoming really hard for small, original, one-off ideas to have a home, Audio Flux is a force for good in the audio community. They have been doing this since 2023, and some of the circuits have been about pets, "firsts," and letting go. Their fifth circuit was based around a series of images—and one of those immediately jumped out at me:
As soon as I saw it, I thought of The Sounds of the Office, a "found sound" record put out on Folkways Records in 1964. I first learned about the album in 2012 when I was doing research in the Folkways archives, but I never dove too deeply into it. (At that point, I was more interested in other albums in the Folkways Science Series, like Sounds of a Tropical Rainforest in America, a wacky little album that I wrote about for the Folkways magazine.)
But now, I found myself wondering if there was a story behind the sounds in that office. Whose office was it, anyway? And what was the person recording it doing there?
So I started poking around one corner of the digital Folkways archive, and sure enough, I found a few answers. The recordist was Michael Siegel, and the office was El-Tronics in his hometown of Warren, Pennsylvania. In 1963, Siegel had recorded one other album for Folkways, the semi-legendary Sounds of the Junkyard, which Lester Bangs wrote about in 1981 and which allegedly became a favorite of Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo. Sounds of the Office felt like that record's less interesting cousin by comparison.
Then I saw a few entries in the archive that pointed me in a new direction: a reel of tape that had been recorded for the album but not included in the final version. Two amazing archivists at Folkways—Cecilia Peterson and Dave Walker—were able to track this down and digitize it for me, and from there, a small story started to unfold. The story got a little bigger and more interesting thanks to notes from my friend Theo Balcomb. Michael Raphael brought the sound effects to life and kept everything in sonic balance, and Marc Bianchi generously provided the music.
I was honored to have this piece chosen as a finalist by the Audio Flux team, and I actually feel like this is the beginning, and not the end, of this story. For starters, I still have questions about Michael Siegel and the other voices on that reel of tape. And on a broader level, I'm also thinking of this piece as a kind of pilot for what episodes of the Field Noise podcast might sound like. In fact, I'm hoping one of the episodes in the forthcoming season will be a longer version of this story.
Also: Audio Flux happens to be launching their podcast—featuring pieces from all of the circuits—next week. Get a jump on things and subscribe now by clicking the button below. Not sure when my piece will air, but this way you'll be the first to know.