Library Everywhere

I first learned about Jacob Smigel through a friend who had heard part of Eavesdrop: A Wealth of Found Sound. I ordered Eavesdrop from Jacob’s site and was extremely happy with my purchase (a mere $10!). Along with the CD, Jacob enclosed several stickers, a black and white photograph of an old man getting a haircut, and a hand-written note saying hello and asking if I knew some members in a band he thought was from Kansas City (I didn’t).

Jacob spent years scouring thrift stores and yard sales, looking for discarded cassette tapes and forgotten answering machine recordings. He assembled the best and most bizarre of what he found and released it as Eavesdrop.

From Jacob’s MySpace (where you can hear lots of his work, BTW):

Eavesdrop is a collection of anonymous recordings found at thrift stores, yard sales, and in trash bins over the past four years. These unaltered tracks come from audio or micro-cassettes, 8-Tracks and home-recorded records. Many of the clips are segments from audio diaries, tape-letters, the sound of road trips, fights, crying, family moments, telephone conversations/messages, or the amusements of children or the mentally handicapped.

A minimum of editing or manipulation was used in the making of this album. I did not add music to the tracks (or mash them up), but instead served as preservationist (or curator) to present the listener with the most powerful recordings in their natural state. Some are funny, some are ridiculous, others make no sense. A few are so perfect I can’t believe I actually found them.

Eavesdrop is a scattered documentation of what I call “the golden age of personal recording (1965 – 1986).” It is about the wonder that is putting our experiences, feelings, and lives down on tape.

In addition to curating found sounds, Jacob is also a musician. His latest (and supposedly last; he’s starting medical school soon- go figure) project is an album called New Mexico, which combines music, field recordings and spoken word to paint a portrait of an old adobe cabin his family visited on holidays during his youth. Jacob’s music has a folksy quality to it and his voice kind of reminds me of Stephen Malkmus. One of my favorite tracks consists of Jacob talking about a mysterious encounter he had with a pack rat while staying in the cabin with some friends.

I really dig Jacob’s ability to create a kind of sacred context through which to display people’s personal histories, whether they belong to him or to someone he’s never met. New Mexico is great on one level just because it’s a pleasure to listen to, but it’s also a very layered and complex examination of a time and place that has special meaning to the author. The songs and stories on the album function as little vignettes into Jacob’s past, each one a kind of meditation on the meaning of memory and place.

Eavesdrop is fun to listen to in a different way. When I was a kid I carried a tape recorder around with me and narrated whatever I was doing. I would tape myself cleaning my room, brushing my teeth, making up a song, whatever. I have no idea where those tapes are today, but if I were to stumble across them I imagine I would feel like I did when I listened to Eavesdrop for the first time. Even though the clips have been “curated,” you can’t help but feel that you’re playing a part in discovering them. None of these recordings were created with the intent of people actually hearing them, which allows us to drop in and listen to people at their most honest, most vulgar, most vulnerable, and most interesting.

Parts of Eavesdrop are occasionally played on Hollow Earth Radio, which is another great spot to hear found sound.

Here’s Jacob’s website.