Piece Comment

Review of The Coney Island Pier


You're either gonna love or hate this piece. You'll either make room on the radio for it or not know what to make of it. Producers such as Seth Lind are good for us to hear. His film background urges him to play with sound differently than we do as radio producers. To the casual listener this piece makes no sense. It's full of rich evocative underscoring and stream of consciousness narrative that doesn't have a beginning, middle or end. It's more of a rich layered soundtrack for a film that we need to visualize in our minds. We're not told what we're supposed to be thinking or hearing - it just is. And because of that, I don't hear this having much airplay for most radio stations. Perhaps a college station. Perhaps a late nite drop-in between Echoes and Hearts of Space. This is the kind of piece you used to like to get drunk or (dare I say it?) do drugs to listen to like Dark Side of the Moon to make up your head movies. Are we past all that on good "old" public radio? I wonder...