ArchiveFM

Radiolab

Music Hat

Duration
33m
Broadcast on
29 Aug 2025
Audio Format
other

With this episode, we’re putting on our music hat. For a program that relies so much on scoring and sound, it’s not often we talk about the musicians and the music they make that inspire us. Today, that changes. Today, we bring you two stories. Each about musicians that our former host and creator of Radiolab, Jad Abumrad, loves. 

We originally released these stories many years ago, and both start deep in music itself. Then quickly, they dig deeper — into our relationships with technology, and ourselves. 

We start with the band Dawn of Midi, who straddle the intersection between acoustic and electronic sounds. Jad talks to the band about their album, Dysnomia, and how it's filled with heavily-layered rhythms that feel both mechanistic and deeply human, at the same time.

Then, Jad talks with Juana Molina, an Argentine singer who accidentally became a famous actress, when all along all she really wanted was to be a musician. 

Special thanks to Dawn of Midi and Juana Molina.

EPISODE CREDITS: 

Reported by - JAD ABUMRAD 

EPISODE CITATIONS:

Check out Dawn of Midi at dawnofmidi.com and Juana Molina at juanamolina.com

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Hey, I'm Lulu Miller. So Radio Lab, you know, we're a science show. Tell science stories are stories that don't seem sciencey at first, but then have a scientific question at their heart. But there's another element at the core of Radio Lab, which is music. The creator of this whole operation and original host, Jada Bumrod, was a musician before he was a journalist. And he took music and brought it into the DNA of the show. And that's still how we do it today. So this week, we're going to listen back to two pieces that Jada made about musicians, musicians he loves and uses on the show. These are both stories he made years ago. And what I really love about them is that they start deep in the music purely about the music. But then each one unfurls into something more philosophical about our relationships with technology, our relationships to ourselves. So here they are in an episode we are calling, "Music Hat." Hope you enjoy. Yeah, wait, wait, you're listening to Radio Lab from WNYC. Okay, so I'm going to put on my music hat for a couple of minutes. Okay. And then in two weeks, we can put our other hats back on, whatever they're called. Small-ian humanism, whatever. Look, we are many people. We are many people. I am a musician as well as a storyteller. You are a Broadway showtune singer, as well as a radio rock-on tour. I would like to have been a Broadway show. No one has ever invited me to do that. Well, I'm going to invite you at least to listen to my version of that for just a few minutes. I'm going to tell you about a band that I just discovered. This may be the coolest thing I've heard in years. Actually, you know this band. I mean, maybe you don't know that you know them, but we've used them in a few shows. Remember the piece we did in The Bliss Show about the perfect snowflake? Yes. We used them there. Oh, remember the story about the artist who weaponized his own blood? Yes, pardon me. We used them there too. So in a subtle way, I have already been exposed to them. That's what I'm saying. Although I am quite certain you will hate their music. I could be wrong about that. Well, I will be as generous as I know possibly how to be. The band is called Dawn of Mitty. Dawn of what? Of Mitty. M-I-D-I. Do you know what Mitty is? No. It's sort of like a computer language for music. Like in my studio at home, I have a bunch of synthesizers and various things. They all talk to each other using Mitty. Oh, the dawn of Mitty. Dawn of Mitty. It's one of those half and halves. Like Dawn suggests something pleasant, beautiful, and sort of movie-like. Mitty, technological card, cold. Yeah, that's actually not a bad place to start. Okay, so the band is three guys. The Kasha's Rani. He plays the bass. Amino Belliani plays the piano of Cosum Nakhvi plays the drums. They met in college at CalArts. Initially, though, their partnership was not about music. It was about tennis. It began on the tennis courts. Well, on the tennis courts. Yeah, it was funny, actually, because we would play late at night. That's the Kasha, the bass player. Cosum had stolen the key and kept it or something. And one night, we were there at like 3 a.m. and I think we were really drunk and security showed up. And he saw us. They were pounding the ball back and forth, yelling. And when he saw the intensity with which we were involved in this match, he was like, you know, you guys should continue, like, carry on. And he left. And that intensity sort of translated into the music that they started to play. Maybe not the competitive part, but they would take it really seriously. Like what they would do is they'd get together. We'd go into these classrooms that had no windows and turn out all the lights. And they would play these long, crazy sets in pitch, black, darkness. It was completely, totally improvised. Like, before they started, they would have no idea what key they were going to play in. No. No idea of what tempo? No. Or how long they were going to go? No. Would you at least figure out who was going to play first? No. I mean, they just start cold. Cold. But it would end up sort of like that 3 a.m. tennis match. Really intense rolling, rollicking improvisations. Kind of a tonal. Hey tonal. Oh boy. I mean, I know. I know. I would just try not to use that word. It's really, I like it. It's really interesting stuff. And like I said, we use it in the snowflake story. But that style of music is not actually what I'm going to present

Transcription truncated.