iMMERSE! with Charlie Morrow

Composer & host Charlie Morrow in conversation down memory lane with Charlemagne Palestine, Brooklyn-born polymath artist & musician, early champ of NY- minimalist music but also a self-described MAXimalist, stuffed animal aficionado, percussionist, carilloneur, [church] organist – & entertaining storyteller.  © photo: Plamen Hubenov. He got his start singing Jewish traditional songs b...

Finnish actor Santeri Karl-Henrik Kinnunen, the son of 2 actor-parents, found early immersion spending time on a farm as a Helsinki city child. There he became utterly fascinated by horses, learning to ride & go somewhere else with his thoughts & dreams, immersed in the countryside. Kinnunen is a veteran of the Helsinki City Theatre & has acted in the KOM Theater as well as the Finnish...

The Swede Anders Kreuger is a curator, writer & educator. He has been the director of the renowned Kohta Gallery in Helsinki since 2019. Prior to that, he was the senior curator at HKA, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp, the director of the Malmö Art Academy, & was a member of the Programme Team for the European Kunsthalle in Cologne. He was a founding member of the Nordic Council...

Harri Koskinen is a man of many talents.  Born in 1970 in Karstula, Finland, with a populations of a population of 3,625 is located in Central Finland. Harri studied design came to Helsinki city to st at the Institute of Art & Design. He's best known as a leading innovator of Nordic design for, among other things, his award-winning Block Lamp, the familiar light build inside a rectangular bric...

Robert Thurman's words were the first I ever read about Tibetan Buddhism, describing the inner explorers of its practices as "psychonauts" and its mental tools for liberation "spiritual technology." Few have done as much to advance the understanding and practice of Tibetan Buddhism in the West and I consider him one of my greatest heroes and teachers.  • Scott Snibbe    Robert Thurman, an American...

An internal conversation between the creator of iMMERSE!, Charlie Morrow & the producer of  iMMERSE!, bart plantenga. They’ve been working on the iMMERSE book-podcast-exhibition project for some years now & it was time to take stock of what they’ve learned & experienced... The fact is the subject of immersion, losing yourself in a context, a space, an altered consciousness remains fasc...

Lotta Wennäkoski is a Finnish composer based in Helsinki. She has won praise and has been described as a lyrical Modernist and post-Expressionist. She studied violin in Budapest in her youth. She also studied music theory & composition at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki as well as the Royal Conservatory of The Hague under Louis Andriessen.   Wennäkoski launched her career composing for radio...

CM Hausswolff: Immersion at the Junction of Electronics & Nature 32 "I was thinking about immersion & that word – when you become engulfed with something, when you sink into something & you feel that you are a part of something." Carl Michael von Hausswolff [also known CM Hausswolff & personally known as Mickey] was born in Sweden in 1956. He’s unusual in that he readily admits he...

In the early 1960s, Poet & multimedia artist Gerd Stern & friends Michael Callahan & Steve Durkee founded USCO (an acronym for Us Company or the Company of Us). It became a burgeoning cooperative group of artists, poets, filmmakers, engineers, & composers who worked out of an old church in Garnerville, New York, north of NYC. It is here that they emerged as probably the first produ...

“I define immersive as the first time I realized that there was a bigger universe than my daily life.”  David First is a many-sided composer-musician having played in Dead Cheese, a hippie guitar band in his youth, performed with Cecil Taylor in Carnegie Hall, produced many records of minimalist drone music some of which were released on Phill Niblockʼs XI label, he’s played in rowdy bar bands, le...

Robin Sip as a Dutch writer-producer-director and CEO of Mirage3DRobin is best known for productions like Mars 1001, Dinosaurs at Dusk, Origins of Life, Natural Selection & Dawn of the Space Age, which was the world’s first 3D fulldome film. Sip is also an award-winning pioneer of special venue 3D cinema & his Mirage3D is a leading fulldome-VR producer, having produced some 20 fulldome sho...

Phill Niblock migrated to New York after completing a BA in economics at Indiana University, determined to pursue his passions: photography and film, often documenting jazz and modern dance performances. [Playlist below] But, despite having no formal musical training, he soon found himself inspired by the New York music scene and immersed himself in experimental music, specifically loud sound, mic...

Vitiello, a New York native, is an internationally recognized sound artist and mainstay of the New York scene since his early days as a punk guitarist.  He has been influenced by Nam June Paik, has collaborated with Scanner, Pauline Oliveros and Frances-Marie Utti. He is also an electronic musician and visual artist. And, according to Morrow, “an absolute Geiger Counter for places.” In 1999 he did...

Pierre Brand began sound mixing and editing for film in 1994 and has made a name for himself on feature films such as Ghosted and Trial by Fire and on international documentaries of note such as Blue Note A story of Modern Jazz, Absolute Warhola, Wildnis Europa and The Hunt for Gaddafi's Billions. He attended the Berklee College of Music and currently works out of his Primetime Studio in Hamburg H...

This is a summer interlude, a special remixed iMMERSE! version of the summer of 2022 broadcast of the Wreck This Mess radio show: Wreck the Drowning World 1249 & serves as a reaction to the countless 2023 summer climate catastrophes that have hit far & wide – including the iMMERSE! & Charlie Morrow archive & headquarters in Vermont. I’ve been researching flooding & other climat...

Tim is a museum designer who transforms the static notion of a museum into something dynamic and engaging. He has worked for Ralph Appelbaum Associates, an award-winning international interpretive planning and exhibition design firm, for over 28 years. He is the director of RAA’s Berlin-based studio. He has directed the interpretive planning and exhibition design for many major institutions, inclu...

Gideon D’Arcangelo is a man of many ambitions. His main interests include the integration of virtual and physical worlds, working toward the design integration of physical, media, systems, graphic & content to ultimately create holistic experiences.  He joined Arup’s New York office in 2019 where he is a Principal and serves as the Americas Digital Services Portfolio Leader  and a designer of inte...

Ville Pulkki’s fame reached the techno avant garde with the adoption of his ingenious VBAP (vector-base amplitude panning) a tool for creating spatial sound. When I met him in Helsinki, I was delighted to discover that behind the techie who developed VBAP, a charming jokester. Since then, I’ve enjoyed his warmth and his efficient organizing of the Acoustics Department at Aalto University, includin...

Micky Remann is a German media artist and producer of media events. He invented the “Liquid Sound” concept and its installation in various locations with exceptional waters such Bad Orb & Bad Sulza in Germany. They involve participants floating in body temperature salt water where they participate in immersive experiences that includes underwater sounds, music, lights and surround video.  Remann a...

Today’s iMMERSE podcast is even more unusual than many of the others. I interviewed Elke and Peter Schumann in February of 2020 in their Glover, Vermont home along with Jay Walbert, the archivist for my Archive in nearby Barton, Vermont. The octagenarian Schumanns immigrated from Germany to New York in 1961 and have led the Bread and Puppet Theater since 1963.  In this podcast, they share their hi...

iMMERSE! 19 Charley Morrow interviews Chris Wangro  Today we talk with my long-time friend & co-conspirator in public events, Chris Wangro. We met through the New City Department of Parks, where he just had been hired as events coordinator. My colleagues and I at the New Wilderness Foundation were producing a summer solstice celebration in New York's Central Park. Chris had, at the time, the early...

  Charlie Morrow: The Magnetic Still Point [hors-serie iMMERSE! podcast] Hello, I’m Charlie Morrow. Welcome to iMMERSE! & our conversations on immersivity. Today is a still point. One of those moments when time seems to have stopped. I’ve been moving further & further north from my origins in New Jersey, US & art & business beginnings in New York City. As a 7 & 8 year-old, my summers in Maine bega...

This is a relaunch of immerse! 6 with updated information on the Notre Dame renovations   Brian Katz, acoustican, CNRS Research Director at Sorbonne University’s Institute Jean Le Rond d’Alembert Sound Lab, is also a specialist in spatial hearing, room acoustics, and virtual reality. The most interesting development in the past few years was his work on the Notre Dame reconstruction with regard to...

iMMERSE! is a series of podcasts I produce with Charlie Morrow who interviews colleagues & collaborators on the trending topic of immersion [think sensuround sound +]. For Morrow, it all began in the mother’s belly, eventually migrating to the Ear Inn where he met a pack of audio outliers & ended up with Ear Magazine & the Audiographics series of cassettes + countless events, interventions & conce...