Station Showcase with PRX

I think with any piece that I do, I always walk away feeling extremely fortunate. What drives me to produce stories is being amazed by people. If I feel like I’ve listened well and been true to what people are trying to say, I just feel lucky to have connected with someone and to have been able to share that.
-Terin Mayer, producer at KRLX in Northfield, MN

Hi, this is Aaron Henkin, curator of the NPR Station Showcase with PRX podcast. Each week I spotlight an exceptional radio story from one of the hundreds of NPR stations around the country, and this week we’ll hear a piece that comes out of KRLX in Northfield, Minnesota. That’s where Carleton College sophomore Terin Mayer volunteers his time and his considerable talents as a producer. Terin is the mind behind this week’s feature, a ‘sound poem’ that explores three African American college students’ experiences with racism. This week, I got the chance ask Terin a few questions about himself, his station, and inspiration behind a piece that he’s titled A Prohibition…

When and how did you get involved with KRLX?
I got involved with KRLX the spring of my freshmen year at Carleton College in Northfield, MN, where I’m currently a sophomore. I’m the producer for the station, which means I edit a sound art/storytelling show called Periscope Radio, train people in ProTools, field recording, and production technique, and help increase and maintain a lot of our features programming.

What sort of a station is it, format-wise?
KRLX is an entirely student-run station staffed by over 200 volunteers. Our programming is primarily free-form music, but over the past years we’ve dramatically increased our news and features content. In addition to great music programming, you can hear events briefs, local news shows from student and community perspectives, issue-focused shows about politics and the environment, interview shows with visiting speakers, and sound-rich arts magazines. The station is extremely multifaceted, but I think the thing that all our DJs, newscasters, and features producers are striving for the same kind of cultivation of student voice.

What inspired you to put together “A Prohibition?”
I was commissioned to produce “A Prohibition” for a temporary museum curated by the multicultural community at Carleton. Each room in the museum brings up the issues of a specific minority. I worked with the Black Student Alliance to create the piece, meeting with students to record testimonials and then shaping three of the voices into a kind of story. Originally, the piece was in the context of a scene that my classmates did for their room.

What did your subjects think when they heard the finished piece?
What I remember was that they were pleased. The piece worked well within the context of their performance. Kayeen, one of the voices in the piece, is a poet and novelist and he pitched an idea about collaborating on a CD to accompany his next book. No solid developments there yet, but we’ll see.

You use some abstract “sound poem” production techniques in the piece — any thoughts about what those techniques bring to the piece?
I was trying to give a kind of sparseness to the production, a kind of isolation to the voices. I wanted the repetitive elements to be insistent and corrosive. I think they echo the sentiment’s Jessica, Corey, and Kayeen are expressing.

You can hear more of Terin Mayer’s work online at The Public Radio Exchange, where producers from around the world post their stories. Write your own reviews and help decide what ends up on the radio at www.prx.org.

[Download the MP3]

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