The Alchemy of Making Something From Nothing

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Hi Everyone!

CC here from Audiocraft. March has been full of madness, to say the least. I don’t even follow the sports, but for those keeping score at home, this past month has brought me: A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to executive produce the time-traveling freedom narrative of my wildest podcast dreams, an incredible residency and collaboration with my favorite Black and BIPOC arts org in Portland to develop said epicness – PLUS one notice to vacate my apartment and zero paid work. Yes besties, the math continues to math not.

the stude

Those of you who have followed me for a while or know me IRL know that the past few years have been rife with challenges that have made it difficult, and at times impossible for me to continue the physically, emotionally and mentally demanding work of audio journalism and documentary work. 

In this valley, exiled from the life I was expecting, I’ve given myself permission to wander beyond the traditional expectations of an audio practice and exit the audio career escalator. I’ve already held all the jobs from production assistant to executive producer, but the one I love most is the one I get to do the least: Be the talent.

As a person who is creative, professionally– a culture worker of the nebulous in-between–a lot of my creative and professional work has focused on giving form to the unseen, and to making space and containers to explore the intricacies of embodied storytelling experiences. So much of what I dream of expressing lacks vocabulary, but opportunities to share my thoughts/ hobbies/ obsessions with you helps me get closer to locating those terms, and myself in relation to them.

I’m so grateful to each of you for your time, enthusiasm and support. It means the world to me. One of the hardest parts of adjusting to lack of accessible work is the alienation I’ve felt from missing out on being actively involved in the thriving thought-sphere of radio and podcasting. It feels so good to find a way to engage in meaningful conversations about audio culture and creativity with like minded folks. 

The majority of pieces that I’ve managed to publish in recent years have largely focused on highlighting the extractive labor and reporting practices of the podcasting industry. I was motivated to visibilize my “invisible” work  because it is not my work alone.  As an emergent generation of audio creators shaping a new media art form, it is imperative that we find the language to address inequities that have co-evolved with production of this new media art. 

Audio journalism and storytelling is an intellectually rigorous and emotionally demanding field that is fueled by the invisible labor of countless workers leveraging their marginalized identities for access, processing collective pain for soundbites. We must name and give value to the additional burdens that some of us carry while also attempting to meet the dizzying array of implicit and explicit norms that we are expected to comply with in order to succeed in hierarchical enterprises.

This work has been crucial for helping to right the scales of the foundational injustices that have demoralized and harmed so many of us. This is a time that requires collective transformation. And therefore, it is time for the artists to step forward to create new visions, to heal the past and lay it to rest.

But even art-making is a luxury of time, attention and resources. Few of us have access to all three at once, it seems…which leads me back to my present paradox. In this time of uncertainty with my career, my health and my housing, my mind kept wandering back to a quietly revolutionary question: “What do I want to do?”

While my functional capacity is steadily increasing after spending much of the last year in brain rehab therapies, I still have a ways to go before I will have the endurance to work in a full-time production setting. But, for the first time in years, I can imagine just beyond the horizon of the current moment. 

One of the biggest takeaways I’ve encountered in four years of somatic therapy work (among other self-regulation strategies) is that regulating the nervous system, and therefore brain, – is that self-expression is the key to resolving dysregulation.

In the liminal space between “well” and “not well”, I am both liberated and oppressed by my body’s inability to keep pace, or “function” in society. In Maslow’s hierarchy, we can infer that most humans need calm nervous systems– AKA a “sense of (felt)safety” in their body and environments in order to reach self-actualization. And what is art, if not a crystallization of the soul, actualized. 

Of course much art has been made out of duress, but statistically speaking, it’s the exception. People, even marginalized people, and perhaps even ESPECIALLY, deserve to create from a place of peace instead of as a plea to have our humanity recognized.

Now with that, and nothing to lose, here’s a sneak peek into where I am now in the process of coming back to my art and alchemizing the pains of the past into my hopes for the future.

(Thanks CoCo McCracken at Indigo Arts Alliance for filming this!) <3

I’ll be posting more soon about ways to connect with me about my work with the Abyssinian, as well as ways to support. While we wait for the grant money to rain down, any direct support (Venmo @ccpaschal, CashApp $ccpaschal) to help with living and production expenses is greatly appreciated. And as always, if you found any of this helpful or inspiring to your practice, share with your friends and community!