audio
k-pop true crime podcast, bloody princeton history, music written for tv shows
Though most of my work nowadays is visual/documentary, I’ve also been doing more audio/podcast work. Here are my two latest series.
AUTHENTIC: The Story of Tablo (VICE, iHeart)
Someone once called this a ‘K-pop True Crime Podcast’, and it’s a little hard to argue with that.
In late 2021, I flew to Korea to talk to one of their biggest hip-hop stars.
This podcast is a mind-bending ride through a conspiracy theory that ruined lives all over the world, sent people to jail, and damn near got Interpol involved. And a guest appearance by QAnon.
In the process, we interrogate Korean education culture, American ‘soft power’, hip-hop's code of ethics, and whether there is anything we can do about Internet mobs.
It’s been featured in Deadline, NME, Vulture, and lots of other places. The first episode is below, or check it out wherever you get your podcasts (here’s Apple Podcasts, and Spotify).
If Everybody Knew
In 2022, I produced a podcast for Princeton University, called If Everybody Knew, as part of a postdoctorate fellowship. Aside from the production, I also composed all the music. More about that below.
You can check one of the standout episodes here, or listen in your favorite podcast app (here it is in Apple Podcasts, and Spotify).
MUSIC
Music is mostly a side thing, but occasionally I do some professional work. A couple examples: this HBO segment about videogames features an opening track by me, and I did some scoring for KPCC/LAist's award-winning Finding Home con DACA.
I made a lofi album (long story), here's a sample:
I’ve also released the soundtrack to the If Everybody Knew podcast, for free. Here is a sample:
open the below section to hear more and grab the files for yourself:
the princeton tracks
as mentioned above, these were all written for a Princeton podcast.
There’s also a few unreleased ones in here as well – tracks that I liked but never actually used in the show; and a couple new ones I’ve added.
It’s mostly background music, so I imagine it might work well for podcasts, or videos.
I consider all this music part of my public scholarship, so I've made it all free online for non-commercial purposes.
you can download the whole pack here.
the terms:
These are released under a CC BY-NC-SA license, meaning that you can use this for any non-commercial purpose, so long as it's credited to me. A link back to this page is fine, or crediting me in the audio is fine. Whatever seems reasonable to you and your project – we’re good.
If you would like to use any of these for a commercial purpose, or have any questions, feel free to message me. I'd also love to see how you use it, so if you make a project that uses or remixes any of this, please drop me a line!
Oh, and incidentally, if you’d like to hear some of my other music, you can find it here.
(If you're curious about the composition, about a third of these were written on a Polyend Tracker, then most of the rest were written in Renoise.)
ONE-OFFS
Below are some single/one-off podcast episodes that I either hosted or did interviews on that turned out nice.
On black/asian ‘solidarity’
Through 2020/21, there have been many incidents of anti-Asian violence across the country. And after back-to-back videos of assaults on elderly people in the Bay Area went viral earlier this year, VICE News Tonight correspondent Dexter Thomas noticed a recurring theme—many comments on social media platforms fixated on the fact that the attackers were black. [...] In this episode, Thomas digs into the legacy and current state of black and Asian solidarity in the U.S.
On Twitter as a ‘broken’ video game
Back in 2021, I was interviewed (along with others) on a KQED’s Forum episode about the function of social media as a ‘public square’.