Please join both the TAPS and Sound and Society Workshops for:
Neil Verma
Assistant Professor in Radio/Television/Film, Northwestern University
Who will Present:
American Bottom: An Experimental Audiobook
Respondent: Fiona Boyd, PhD Student in Music, University of Chicago
Tuesday, February 1,
4:30–6:00 PM CST
Over Zoom
Please register for the workshop HERE. The workshop coordinators will circulate the Zoom link and the American Bottom recording to registrants prior to the workshop. Please listen to the recording if you have time.
(And please do not cite or circulate the work-in-progress without the author’s explicit consent.)
We are committed to making our workshop fully accessible to persons with disabilities. Please direct any questions or concerns to TAPS workshop coordinators, Michael Stablein (mstableinjr@uchicago.edu) and Catrin Dowd (catrindowd@uchicago.edu) or Sound and Society workshop coordinators, Ronit Ghosh (ronitghosh@uchicago.edu), and Darren Kusar (dkusar@uchicago.edu)
ABSTRACT: American Bottom is a work of experimental audio fiction directed by Neil Verma based on an original long poem by playwright Brett Neveu, incorporating into the text original field recording, performed narration, music, foley and sound. It is designed to be listened to with headphones.
The poem takes the form of a sonic memory ritual linking characters, voices and settings around a supernatural event. But American Bottom isn’t a linear narrative. Instead, it offers a series of interwoven stories and sonic fragments from the “American Bottom” region of Southern Illinois, so-called because it is a flood plain on what was the “American” side of the Mississippi during French colonial times, across the river from present-day St. Louis. The region is home to Cahokia, a medieval-era Indigenous city of mounds that was the capital of the Mississippian civilization, which casts a mysterious historical shadow across the region. It’s also home to Kaskaskia, the first Illinois capital, which has been destroyed in floods four times – it’s sometimes called the “American Atlantis” – and other key historic sites, including one of the first incorporated Black towns in the U.S., Brooklyn, Illinois.
Neveu’s poem takes place in contemporary times, but it is created with these histories, cataclysms and mysteries in mind, with characters transfixed by fragments of forgotten and recovered history, scattered across a semi-rural landscape that is itself transforming through decay, disinvestment and reinvention.
American Bottom was created by a collective, including me, Neil Verma (Director), Brett Neveu (Writer), Ele Matelan (Foley Artist), Matthew Muniz (Music) Frankie Pedersen (Indigenous Consultant and Digital Art Editor) and Rich Sparks (Visual Arts) and was presented as an online audio drama by A Red Orchid Theatre in Chicago in June of 2021. The performers were: Echaka Agba, Sherman Edwards, Caleb Wayne Fath, Bernard Gilbert, Lawrence Grimm, Charlie Herman, Amanda Raquel Martinez and June Thiele.
American Bottom was mixed by Alex Inglizian at the Experimental Sound Station in Chicago, and our recording engineer was Troy Cruz. Many thanks to Stephan Moore and Gregory Whitehead for their advice, to Jeff Kolar for the use of his static recordings, and Northwestern University for the seed money and recording space.
All the field recordings, songs, foley and performances were captured specifically for this piece. Recordings took place in Randolph, Monroe, Madison, St. Clair and Cook Counties in Illinois.
BIO: Neil Verma is assistant professor of sound studies in Radio/TV/Film. He serves as core faculty in Comparative Literary Studies, associate director of the MA in Sound Arts and Industries, and on the Executive Committee of the Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre and Drama. Verma’s work focuses on the intersection of sound and narrative, and he specializes in radio drama and audio fiction. He is author of Theater of the Mind: Imagination, Aesthetics, and American Radio Drama (Chicago, 2012), which won the Best First Book Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. He is co-editor of Anatomy of Sound: Norman Corwin and Media Authorship (California, 2016), which won the Kraszna-Krausz best Moving Image Book Award. Recently Verma co-edited Indian Sound Cultures, Indian Sound Citizenship (Michigan, 2020) and a special issue of [In]Transition on emerging forms of audiographic criticism. He has published articles on topics from film noir to podcast studies in such journals as Critical Quarterly, Participations, and Velvet Light Trap. In 2017, he was awarded a Digital Humanities Advancement grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to develop digital tools for analyzing vocal texts. Verma also has a practice in experimental recording. His works have been selected for several radio art festivals and he recently directed American Bottom, a new work of audio fiction, for A Red Orchid Theatre. Verma founded the Great Lakes Association for Sound Studies, serves on the Radio Preservation Task Force at the Library of Congress, and is Editor of the RadioDoc Review. In 2021 he was elected to the SCMS Board of Directors for a three-year term.