Mix-tape Mysteries

Jacob Smigel eavesdrops for us all.
by Evan George

It is 1 a.m. on a December morning in 1976 and Carol is in a frightfully low mood. She’s ruminating on everything from her eating disorder to whether the underage, gay liquor store clerk Doug will date her, all the while she masturbates furiously into her handheld tape recorder, and she has no idea that I’m listening.

Jacob Smigel, a quirky and quixotic folk musician from Las Vegas, introduced us-Carol and me. “Her depressing worldview and crude verbiage usually leave me feeling down,” Smigel says, “but it was Carol who taught me that Jack in the Box and The Gap co-existed in 1976.”

He thinks I’ll like her. He thinks you’ll like her too.

Carol is just one of the endearing characters that populate Smigel’s latest, all-encompassing musical project, Eavesdrop: A Wealth of Found Sound. There’s the elderly, female L.A. socialites talking trash about Hamburger Hamlet’s lesbian owner, the mentally handicapped boy who sings manically over Elvis tunes, and even the Nobel Laureate Hungarian scientist who first isolated Vitamin C talking about his escape from the Holocaust. While Smigel’s brand of intimate songwriting-evident on both 2003’s Animal Diseases and 2005’s Full Grown and Talking About Fountains-displays an uncanny ability to tell the stories of unborn babies and grain factory workers. These people are not figures of his imagination. They are quite real-or were anyway.

Eavesdrop, which comes out July 1, is an 80-minute collection of field recordings that run the gamut from personal audio-journals, like Carol’s, to conversations mistakenly recorded on answering machines. The 40 tracks, nearly all of which Smigel has culled from hours of thrift store rummaging, form a scattered documentation of what he calls “the golden age of personal recording from 1965-1986.”

A couple years ago, Smigel was perusing a Vegas thrift store when he came across a beat-up, unmarked cassette tape, and he bought it for kicks. The cassette turned out to be the tape letter of a senile old widow talking to her son living in another part of the country, detailing her daily routines in a home, her extreme loneliness, and her uncontrollable fear of death by wild fire. “In talking to her son, she was also talking to me, and her honesty was amazing,” says Smigel. “Listening to her tape was like finding some lost distress signal. One transmitted so long ago that there was obviously no hope for the transmitter. It was a powerful thing, and I was transfixed.”

His obsession shows in every second of the album-after all, digging through others’ trash and give-away piles was only the beginning of the process. At first he would collect tapes to listen to while driving around town, but soon he was bringing a Walkman to every yard sale and thrift shop and turning their shopping aisle into his listening station. Smigel waded through hundreds of hours of tape for more than a year, becoming a confidante to dead people, the curator of found sound collages and the producer of anonymous people’s memories, to select what he felt were the most captivating stories. And if that weren’t enough, all 40 entries on Eavesdrop come with a written introduction by Smigel and a transcript of some of the more unintelligible conversations, one more sign that he’s not just finding these audio encounters, he is trying to help re-write them for a larger audience, believing they are valuable and can tell us something about our own seemingly-trivial encounters. That, and he’s nosy. LAA

Jacob Smigel will be performing live with the Las Vegas Club on Tuesday, June 27 at Mr. T’s Bowl.