Film director, Lena Dunham collaborator and now sultry radio voice Miranda July is renowned for her wacky experimental work: her Somebody app has random users deliver awkward verbal messages to strangers and allows bidders the chance to win weird items mentioned in her fictional book The First Bad Man Store. She completely owns her prolific status as riot grrrl, sharp-witted progressive and west coast punk alumni, but who knew she was so ahead of the game with this resurfaced audio art piece?
Long before podcasts became as influential as whodunit Serial, the writer, artist and filmmaker made a track titled “WSNO”, which she tweeted a link to on Monday.
In the track, listeners tune into a radio show called The Secret Believers Walkie-Talkathon, where fictional callers tell their secrets. It all gets a bit Truman Show: July's unsettling voice, dripping with sweetness, cuts over the airwaves, where it moves into creepy amplified and distorted music and psychedelic noise, spliced together with her warped sense of humour.
Throughout her career, July has experimented with the framework of podcasts and audio, with the likes of “Medical Wonder” and “Roy Spivey”. Both are fictional podcasts that tell of mysterious experiences in dream-like, sardonic sequences.
Her art has continued to push boundaries. Her teenage project was a riot-grrrl feminist zine called Snarla, and her album 10 Million Hours in a Mile is a terrifying barrage of hypnotic and downright scary tales. A recent project was the collaborative Learning to Love You More, a crowdsourced online project that included a series of assignments for participants like, “Take a photo of your parents kissing” and “reread your favourite book from the fifth grade.”
One thing’s for sure: you could never call her boring. Listen to "WSNO" below.
