Meet your Makers: Ari Erlbaum

Meet your Makers: Ari Erlbaum

Hi, I’m Ari. I just graduated from the Salt semester in Maine, learning to do documentary radio storytelling. This left me ushily-gushily in love with the medium in about a bajillion different ways. Here are just a few of them:

1. You can tell stories with it. Everyone loves stories. And the stories people hear, they start telling themselves, and those stories determine how they see the world. So basically, radio shapes the world. The world is like putty in our hands, muahahaha! Um… I mean, no, just kidding. Let’s use radio as a force for good!
2. It’s an auditory medium. I’m a musician, so I geek out on the sound design and editing, trying to give stories a musical flow.
3. It’s pretty accessible to make, and community radio makes it even more so. Authentic, democratic media!
4. You get to follow your curiousity and find yourself in the craziest places, talking with fascinating people about things you never would have expected. Like bigfoot.

I’m really psyched to use WBTV-LP help people discover how fantastic making radio is, and form a community around it in Burlington. I’m going to get a group together to share ideas and feedback about pieces/shows they’re working on or want to make (stay tuned). I’m ready right now to be a resource for anyone thinking about what they might want to put on the station. At Salt I got pretty good at seeing how to make people’s ideas work better, without losing the personal style. If you have a show idea, topics you want to make a radio piece about, or a piece you want to workshop, let me know!  My email is ari.erlbaum@gmail.com. The station doesn’t go live until May, but there’s talk of some online streaming before then, and we can start developing content now.

Okay, what else about me?

I teach harmonica and a host of other random musical skills. In the name of shameless self promotion, here’s my website: www.pocketmusic.musicteachershelper.com.

I have a case of life ADD, so my other interests are eclectic: comic books, contradancing, any musical instrument, wilderness skills, sci-fi, splitting wood, and evolutionary psychology.

So, that’s me, as much as a blog post sized piece of cyberspace can represent a human. I hope to work on shows with some of you reading this right now!