100+ Podcasts on radio FM4
The magic of radio and podcasts, for me, comes down to the limitations of a medium expressed entirely with only one sense—sound. You can’t see what is happening, yet at the same time you still must find a way to show, rather than tell, to avoid listeners tuning out. You have to paint a picture with sound.
For more than a decade, I travelled solo around the world with only one constant companion: my trusty Roland Edirol recorder; at times I didn’t even bring a camera. Upon returning, I had hours—even days—worth of stories and soundscapes, all of which I painstakingly went through to assemble extended programs, in the best case giving my listeners the feeling of having been to these places with me.
Below are some of my favourite auditory “travel albums.”
Podcast: Here Be Dragons (2015)
All across the Asia-Pacific and back to Europe, I took an incredible journey to the places where mythology and hard science meet. I encountered flesh-eating dragons in the islands of Komodo, fossils of little people dubbed 'hobbits' in Flores, an aboriginal royal family in the jungles of West Timor, and the Taoist God of War in Taiwan. I even met Hollywood’s most famous Hobbit, who was distinctly unimpressed by my story.
All of this, just in the first six months of 2015.
There is also an article.
Podcast: Borneo to be Wild (2017)
Borneo (a.k.a. Kalimantan), the world’s third largest island, hosts an incredible amount of wildlife, from whale sharks to orangutans, sun bears and much, much more. But human activities have been devastating the natural habitat for many of these creatures, and many conservationists wonder if we have reached a breaking point. I’ve visited Borneo on multiple occasions to see some of this wildlife, and get my own perspective on the future of life on this island.
In addition to this podcast, this long-form article details one of my visits to Borneo and how it changed my perspective forever.
Podcast: Life in the North Pole (2015)
Imagine an archipelago so far north that Iceland looks comparatively like a tropical southern island. In a place with more polar bears than human beings, I wondered: what drives a person to come and live in the middle of nowhere?
Svalbard is a Norwegian archipelago very near to the North Pole; it also contains two Russian settlements, Barentsburg and Pyramiden, the latter of which is an abandoned Soviet mining town with a rich and colourful history.
(Naturally, there is also an article.)
Podcast: Protect the Vjosa (2017)
Largely untouched and unstudied, the Vjosa river in Albania is considered a hidden pearl of one of the least visited countries in Europe. Dozens of communities live by its banks, and it is highly significant culturally, even inspiring a unique brand of iso-polyphonic singing which has been granted UNESCO World Heritage status.
In 2017, the Albanian Government approved a dam project that would destroy the flow of the river, flooding neighbouring communities. I met scientists, locals, activists, and musicians, who all had a stake in the continued survival of the River Vjosa.
(There is, of course, an article.)
Podcast: Apausalypse Now (2020)
Unlike the rest of these podcasts, this last one was assembled entirely in my bedroom; yes, you’ve got it! The year was 2020, and we were all still adapting to a truly astonishing new reality.
I collected testimony from people around the world from all walks of life, including a professor of journalism in southern China, a science journalist in Russia, a marine biologist working in Antarctica, a First Nations woman from the pacific-northwestern archipelago of Haida Gwaii, wildfire survivors in California, and the writer and environmentalist Andri Snær Magnason.
Along with this podcast, there is also an article.