Podcast Episode 1: The Social Justice Warrior & The Polar Bear

Crafted Recordings Podcast

CC-BY-2.5. Photo taken by Ansgar Walk

This episode is a friend of mine, Matt Dyer, telling the story of being attacked and nearly killed by a polar bear in July 2013, in the Torngat Mountains National Park in Canada. I did a more detailed writeup of this story over at Gods & Radicals.

From an audiogeek perspective, this episode consists entirely of remote recordings I have done over the past few months. It begins with the sound of the forest, and me lighting a fire with a ferro rod, birch bark as tinder, and some dried pine as fuel. You can also hear the barred owls that love to visit the woods near my home. These were all recorded with my portable stereo recorder.

Once the fire is going you can hear percussion (by Alfred Lund) and violin (by Carson Lynch). These I recorded with my laptop rig, using a variety of microphones (Heil dynamic mics, and some ribbon room mics for the percussion) with my Focusrite preamps.

Matt’s narrative was also recorded with my portable recorder. In retrospect, his voice is a bit weak from the attack, so I should have put the microphones closer to him, or better yet just used a dynamic mic right up on his mouth, radio-announcer style. Ah well, live and learn. Getting the noise floor of the voiceover tolerable was the biggest technical struggle of this mix, luckily the ambient forest & fire sounds, along with a bit of downward expansion, masked most of the noise pretty well.

Future episodes will have other storytellers, musicians, teachers, and interesting sounds on it. I look forward to bringing more of these episodes out. If you are interested in telling a story, singing a song, or other rants & chants for a future episode please let me know.

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