Program 835: Car Travel, Train Travel, Tram Travel
KALW Broadcast Date: August 10, 2025 | Host: Devin King
There’s no cure like travel! This late-summer vacation edition of Music from Other Minds features field recordings, songs, and poems related to cars, trains, and trams. Three long form pieces center the program: Amber Meulenijzer’s SAAB Fanfare has the sound artist driving her SAAB 900 through Pelt, a town in East Belgium, while a local brass band marches and plays along with a drone emanating from speaker-horns installed on the SAAB’s roof. Artist Sandra Cross MMs Bar Recordings find her traveling weekly from Leicester to London and recording the buffet car announcements. And Other Minds founder and Executive and Artistic Director’s Charles Amirkhanian’s Seatbelt Seatbelt is a modern classic of sound poetry. Poems from Robert Creeley, Lyn Hejinian, and Julie Patton are also featured, as well as field recordings of the San Francisco cable car barn and Disney Land tram car announcer. Rounding everything out is Hiroshi “Hiro” Kawaguchi’s soundtrack to the 1986 arcade game Out Run.
Program Audio
30-Second Spot
Track Info & Links
Title: Poems of Western Travel: “At O’Neill’s Point” & “The Pine at Timber-Line”
Composer: Harriet Monroe
Recording Title: The W. Cabell Greet Recordings: Reading at Columbia University on January 29, 1932
Recording Label: Penn Sound
Title: Inside the Cable Car Barn
Composer: Jed Speare, Peter Mxcandless, Shoshana Wechsler, Chris Jeffries
Recording Title: Cable Car Soundscapes
Recording Label: Folkways Records
Catalog Number: FW06129, FX 6129
Title: SAAB Fanfare
Composer: Amber Meulenijzer
Recording Title: SAAB Fanfare
Recording Label: Self-released
Title: “I Know a Man” five times
Composer: Robert Creeley
Recording Title: (1) read at San Francisco State University, May 20, 1956 (0:28), (2) at the Vancouver Poetry Conference, August 12, 1963 (1:27), (3) read at Harvard University, October 27, 1966 (0:35), (4) read in Bolinas, CA, July 1971 (0:26), (5) read in Bolinas, CA, c. 1965-1970 (0:25):
Recording Label: PennSound
Title: Seatbelt Seatbelt
Composer: Charles Amirkhanian
Recording Title: Lexical Music
Recording Label: OM Music
Catalog Number: OM 1023-2
Title: “Not that Car” and on “Not that Car”
Composer: Lyn Hejinian (w/ Alan Bernheimer)
Recording Title: From In the American Tree, hosted by Alan Bernheimer, original broadcast December 7, 1979 on KPFA-FM
Recording Label: Penn Sound
Title: Magical Sound Shower (Arcade)
Composer: Hiroshi “Hiro” Kawaguchi
Recording Title: Out Run (Remastered)
Recording Label: Data Discs
Title: Buffet Car Attendants
Composer: Sandra Cross
Recording Title: The MMs Bar Recording
Recording Label: Trunk
Catalog Number: JBH 040CD
Title: “Car Tune”
Composer: Julie Patton
Recording Title: Close Listening, with Charles Bernstein, February 12, 2016
Recording Label: Penn Sound
Title: Disney Land Parking Lot Tram Ride with Announcer
Composer: Unknown, originally broadcast on World Ear Project: Series 2, May 27, 1985 on KPFA-FM
OM Archive ID: WEP.1985.05.27.B
Record Label: Other Minds Archives
