WREM: Public Radio REMIX

Law students spend countless hours reading cases and distilling them down to the “black letter law” – the rules they’re tested on at the end of each semester. But what gets lost during that process? A friend series creator Zach Miller once said that “law is history stripped of context”. BeyondtheBlackLetter brings back the context. The history. The politics. The people. Connections with other disciplines, like economics and sociology. The goal is to make the law accessible and engaging, and seek out those “Aha!” moments when you realize that something you’ve taken for granted is far more interesting than you once thought.

BeyondtheBlackLetter is latest in a new crop of “short shows” that focus a single subject over the life of the series, like The Longest Shortest Time (early motherhood), the memory palace (surprising history), Blank on Blank (lost print interviews), and 99% Invisible (design and architecture). It’s a fantastic development in public radio and podcasting.

Helena De Groot lives in Brussels and makes great radio like The Internet in Sepia, a composition which Helena submitted to this year’s Third Coast Festival Short Docs competition. In the piece, Helena meditates on distance in two dimensions: space, and time. Her narrative clips are supported by music composed by friends’ of hers, which you can find here.

The Third Coast Festival curates audio storytelling, and hosts an annual audio conference and competition. Every year they give a “short docs” challenge, inviting producers of all kinds to explore sound within a few paremeters. Here was this year’s prompt:

Produce a short audio story (2 -3 minutes) that features at least two of your neighbors, includes a color in the title, and contains three consecutive seconds of narrative silence. Stories of all styles are welcome – from documentary to drama – and everything in between.

Remix has a number of Third Coast’s Short Doc sumbissions in our mix. Have a listen: