Re:sound #220 The Forest and Flight Show

This hour gravity, antigravity, magical trees and flying carpets.

The Magic Carpet Flight Manual
by Cathy FitzGerald & Matt Thompson ( A Rockethouse Production , BBC World Service, 2010)
Cathy FitzGerald explores the past, present, and very real future of the magic carpet and wonders what our desire to defy gravity tells us about ourselves. Along the way, we meet a Japanese astronaut who took a real carpet into space — and flew it, a Muslim whose prayer mat rises above the mundane and a physicist working on levitation in the quantum world.

Gravitation and Other Graces
by Stephanie Rowden ( Re:sound debut, 2016)
Once upon a time, producer Stephanie Rowden stumbled upon an elderly, gnome-ish, armchair philosopher named Wolfgang. Ailing and living alone, he'd attracted a devoted circle of much-younger friends and caretakers. Stephanie found herself unexpectedly drawn into Wolfgang's orbit, and, in this audio essay, she retraces her path from documentarian to caretaker herself, eventually in search of a very distinctive tree that was to be Wolfgang's final resting place.

This episode of Re:sound was produced by Dennis Funk.