"You can't do THAT on the radio!" Oh, but they did. A clique of bawdy freethinkers dared talk about things one just didn't talk about on the airwaves. The aptly-named Audio Smut kicked up a fuss in its first life on Montreal's CKUT-FM (find some early audio here; Listener discretion advised) til fading away, only to be reborn as a podcast.
While the topics are still pretty much NSFW -- their mantra: "A show about your body, your heart and your junk" -- the new Audio Smut sheds its college radio spunkiness for a more polished approach. Each episode is as thoughtfully crafted as an artisan item on Etsy.
Behind it all is a team of producers (or should that be provocateurs?), headed by Kaitlin Prest and Mitra Kaboli. Here's part one of our interview with two podcasters who take great pleasure in making their listeners blush.
You'll soon be launching your second season, but tell us about the earlier version of Audio Smut broadcast on Montreal radio and how it evolved.
Mitra Kaboli: The show was originally started in 2007 by a group of sex workers in Montreal airing on CKUT 90.3. It was a traditional two-way interview-style show. In 2008, the creators left the show and a new team was amassed, this included Kaitlin.
Kaitlin Prest: Britt Wray, Jess MG and I were really in to the creative possibilities of radio. Nora Rohman (aka the lesbian queen of Mile End, Montreal's Left Bank) and Linda Tsang were deep in the queer arts scene in Montreal. It was a great mix. The mandate was rewritten and this is when the style that you hear now was created, but in a more adolescent form. One of my favourite stories about that era of Audio Smut was the recording of our first episode. We launched a mini-radio soap opera “Pleasures” (inspired by Nick Danger & the Firesign Theater). Jess wrote the script, I did the sound design, and the Audio Smut collective huddled into CKUT’s studio B to record. Studio B at the time was the size of a bedroom closet and 4 of us crammed in there, faking orgasms and spankings at the top of our lungs. The first Audio Smut-inspired blushes happened at the station that day.
MK: We definitely used our former years at the station as a sandbox. CKUT gave us all the tools that we needed to get experience and become awesome radio makers. I joined the collective in 2010 and around that time Jess built the website and launched the Audio Smut podcast. In January 2012, Kaitlin and I began managing the show out of Brooklyn and since then, the growth has been exponential! We have a really solid team of collaborators with all different backgrounds and all different skill sets. Jen Ng, Julia Alsop, Rae Dooley were the main brains on Season One. Additionally we've been moving the medium of radio into other spaces by hosting events and doing installations.
Wasn't the earlier version of the show even more graphic than the current podcast?
KP: The earlier version of the show was definitely more graphic. In the beginning, the approach was to change views on sex by unabashedly showing sex. Real sex. Not hollywood sex and not porno. Sex from the perspective of young women, queer people, people of color, old people, people with disabilities, everybody. And we were doing it on the FM dial at 6pm on a Wednesday. For me, the easiest way to do this was to record my own experiences, as you can see in pieces like Afternoon Delight and Tree Love. But it always involved more than just recording our sexual exploits---it involved telling first person stories about sex and asking others to do the same. We asked for all the gory details. The details most people are afraid to say out loud.
I ask myself why the show is less smutty, and the answer is that we work in public radio, and are striving to contend with the best public radio shows out there and to be taken seriously by them. Our peers are the producers of great shows like Love+Radio, 99% Invisible, Snap Judgment and Radiolab. But public radio isn’t a space where you can have a free dialogue about sex. I refuse to let that hold us back. First because I am obsessed with quality---commercial and community radio just don’t have the same standards. Second, because it’s where people go for the information they consider to be important and relevant. And I think honest accounts of our feelings, our relationships and our bodies are important and relevant.
{In case you've never heard Audio Smut, Kaitlin and Mitra whipped up this sensual teaser}
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Sex is such a private thing, how do you get people to open up and talk about stuff they might only tell a close friend?
But on the other side of things, we do have a handful of stories from friends and ex-lovers, so that definitely helps.
KP: We come to the table with no judgement. Whatever this person might be into; balloons, gang bangs, scat, unbirth, we are here to listen. People with unique sexual interests are normal people. They are your mom, your boss, your cab driver and you. And as long as there’s consent involved, it’s all good, well mostly.
I always ask to interview people in their bedrooms. It just so happens the sound tends to be best in the bedroom, but it also sets the tone a little bit. We’ll sit facing each other cross legged like you might have in pre-teen sleepovers.
How do find your stories?
MK: A lot of it is word of mouth. We spend a lot of time talking to people about shows we are working on and from there a snowball effect of, “hey, have you heard about this?” or, “that totally happened to my friend. Should I put you guys in touch?” Other times we have an idea about a certain subject matter so we reach out to people within those networks and communities to get in touch with some people.
KP: When you’re working on a project as consistently as we do, finding stories becomes integrated with your everyday life. Every time something interesting happens to me, every time I meet someone interesting, the questions surface immediately, “Should I be recording this? How inappropriate would it be to take out my recorder right now?” or just simply, “Should I get this person’s contact info and follow up later?” There are some ethical questions to be asked about this to be sure. But documentary radio is my life, so the boundaries are really unclear for me.
Do the stories drive your content for a season of shows, or do you come up with topics and then find stories that fit?
MK: Generally it is the latter. We have an idea of a concept that we want to explore so we will strive to find stories that will fit into that matrix. Occasionally, we will have a couple of story leads or even old, unused interviews from the prior season that we can use to build an episode around.
Which episodes have generated the biggest response?
MK: The quickies tend to be quite popular. I think people are into short formats these days. Despite The Birth episode being unpopular in terms of actual listens, we received a lot of positive feedback from the folks who dared to listen. Overwhelmed and Lovemaps also generated great listener feedback. Overwhelmed recently got featured at an Italian journalism festival. In the words of the curator of that exhibition, “it is perfect.”
Has listener feedback ever indicated an episode may have been too explicit or icky (for example, the Poo episode)?
MK: The Poo episode ended up being quite popular. One of our team members at the time refused to take part out of personal poo discomfort, but other than that there was a lot of interest. Most of the outside pitches we received for the last season were for The Poo episode and listener wise, it got a lot of hits.
Episodes that people seem much less interested in are Birth and It Happens to the Best of Us (STIs). The hits on both of those episodes are incredibly low compared to the rest of our stories. But both episodes contain, in our opinion, such important stories to tell with serious historical relevance. We are in the middle of a mini-season with our new partner Mule Radio and we are going to re-release the Birth episode but under a new name, hopefully people won’t be too scared. For people who are still skeptical, neither of those episodes are particularly graphic, so please listen! But both episodes definitely air on the heavier side of things, emotionally speaking.
KP: Yes, surprisingly, even when we were on the actual radio we never had anyone complain about being too explicit.
Stay tuned for Part Two of the Audio Smut interview.
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