There’s a term in radio, dead air, that refers to any stretch of silence that lasts longer than a few seconds. Dead air is the last thing you want; it means something has gone wrong with your broadcast.
“Shhh.,” by audio producer and editor Jorge Just, could easily be confused for dead air. For nearly three minutes, you hear nothing other than the sounds of Just and his son breathing, backgrounded by the occasional rumble of a vehicle. I love it.
“Shhh.” by Jorge Just, made for Audio Flux Circuit 02: Listening With.
The piece was produced for Audio Flux, an initiative founded in 2023 by longtime audio producers Julie Shapiro and John DeLore. They’re deeply rooted in the industry: before Audio Flux, Shapiro was VP of editorial at PRX and executive producer of PRX’s Radiotopia, where she oversaw podcasts like the award-winning Ear Hustle. DeLore, meanwhile, has sound-designed and edited shows for years, including at WNYC, Stitcher, and Gimlet in its startup days.
In an audio world dominated by long, interview-style shows, Audio Flux is sonically distinct. Every few months, Shapiro and DeLore announce a new “circuit,” or an open submission round with a theme and prompt developed with a creative partner. For instance, writer and artist Wendy MacNaughton helped develop Circuit 01, on the theme of “letting go,” and the prompt asked producers to include previously unshared personal archival tape and take inspiration from one of three illustrations by MacNaughton. There are only two limitations for submissions, which are called “fluxworks”: They must respond to the prompt, and they must be three minutes long.
Along with open submissions, Shapiro and DeLore commission a few pieces from producers they’d like to work with for each circuit. Winning and commissioned fluxworks are showcased first in person — the winning fluxworks for Circuit 05, which were announced today, were first presented at the Sound Scene Festival at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. on June 1 — and posted to the Audio Flux website. Eventually, they’ll also live in the Audio Flux podcast feed, launching later this year.
Each fluxwork sounds vastly different from the next, and it’s fascinating to hear how different producers approach each prompt; where Just responded to the prompt “Listening With” by recording himself and his son experiencing silence, producer Talia Augustidis instead focused on the sounds of drones in Gaza.
“In Between Silence” by Talia Augustidis, made for Audio Flux Circuit 02: Listening With.
Audio Flux is a labor of love: funding for the circuits (contributors and the producers of selected fluxworks are paid) comes from an assortment of sources such as the Independent Media Initiative, which funded Circuits 01 and 03. Shapiro and DeLore are trying to expand their funding conversations beyond the audio industry, which Shapiro says “can appreciate Audio Flux but isn’t built to necessarily sustain it monetarily.”
I called up Shapiro to learn more about Audio Flux and the team’s plans for the future. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity, and you’ll find a few more fluxworks interspersed throughout this story.
A couple of years ago, I was talking with my now partner in Audio Flux, John DeLore, about the state of the industry. He had recently been laid off, and I was in between things, and everyone we talked to was kind of miserable and disappointed and had industry fatigue and was scared, and we just thought, “What happened?” We used to all just be so joyful and in love with this medium and its potential, you know? The Third Coast vibe had been so strong for so long, but it was really buried under all of the biz-dev and technology and other conversations happening around podcasting as it became more mainstream and multimillion dollar this and that and celebrity-driven. So we thought, “Well, it’s missing for us. Let’s make something that can help fill that void.”
I had always loved the short docs challenge at Third Coast. I was thinking about writing a book about them, but then I went, “Why don’t we just do it again and see who’s out there right now all these years later, interested in participating?”
We’re trying to give people opportunities to have their work heard by their peers and friends and strangers. It’s really about the culture that forms around the cohorts and participating in the community, and the pieces can be little calling cards.
If you have a lot of experience, it gives you an opportunity to try something completely different from what you usually do. If you don’t have much experience, it’s manageable. And if you’ve never done any audio, it’s actually still manageable. The point is to explore what you can do with sound, but we wanted something that everyone could feel part of if they chose to.
[Three minutes is] also the length of a pop song. These pieces can get sort of stuck in your head, and it’s a pretty easy listening experience, too. If a listener has never heard a sound art piece before and one of them is pretty noisy, it’s going to be over soon. It’s tolerable, I think, to sit through three minutes.
Three minutes also allows us to present them in batches. When you hear a few you start realizing “oh, these people took the same prompts and went in these wild, different directions.” It becomes interactive with the listener in a way I really love. You couldn’t do that with three 15-minute pieces. So the form is just really flexible and nimble.
“Hum Honge Kamyab” by Radhika Viswanathan and Samyuktha Varma, for Audio Flux Circuit 04: Firsts.
We’re introducing the creative partners to our people, and hopefully we’re getting introduced to their worlds a little bit. Some of them are very active: we were just at the Hirshhorn last weekend — which is not a sentence I ever imagined saying — with Circuit 05 partner Eric Drysdale, who’s a 3D photography enthusiast. He was with us from the start, and he was there in D.C., where they concocted this crazy projection mechanic so we could project a 3D video [to go with the audio].
Other partners respond to the pieces in other ways, like for Circuit 03, which was about pets, the artist made pet portraits in response to the pieces. So it just adds this other element that takes it beyond us.
To me it’s all about expanding what we think podcasting is, especially right now. We have a very narrow idea of what you can do with a podcast. It’s about inspiration, really: We’re inspired by these people, and they help us inspire [others] to make the pieces that then inspire us to keep doing it.
Next we can try for NPR, but for now we got on Lithuanian public.
“Birdland Refracted” by Milio Boogie and Kim Fox, for Audio Flux Circuit 05: In 3D.
At the beginning, I thought it would be something we could take out to the industry and convince them to give us money for it. But it actually hasn’t been a priority. We played around with formats: we developed kind of an extensive pilot, which was an interview with one of the producers from Circuit 01 in early 2024, and we submitted that and got it into Tribeca last year.
But so much of this project happens on nights and weekends, really. So we thought we needed an easier format, and at the beginning of this year we landed on a 10- to 12-minute episode, but I think we’re actually going to cut it back further so it really is just one flux work per episode and a tiny bit of Amy at the top and a tiny bit of Amy at the bottom. It’s really just there to spotlight the pieces. We don’t really have to dress them up with production or anything else.
One of our bottlenecks is that a lot of people tell me “I love Audio Flux. How do I hear it?” The website is serviceable but not beautiful, and we really want to just get it out there. It’ll help with recognition. It’ll help us find partners to keep it going, because that’s a constant struggle. And it kind of makes good on the whole promise of it, which is we want to share your work as far and wide as possible. So we’re going to launch the podcast in the fall.
“The Sound of Silence” by Gregory Warner, for Audio Flux Circuit 01: Letting Go
I have also heard a lot of producers say, “You know, I had this tape sitting around for so long. I had nothing to do with it until this prompt. It was perfect.” or “I always wanted to collaborate with XYZ, and now we have a reason to.” So that’s been a big reason to do this as well. That idea about trying something new that you don’t get to do in your day to day has been a recurring theme.
But really, Audio Flux has kind of been a lifeline for me through this time. And seeing the response has been very affirming. It offers so much, and we get so much out of it ourselves too. Our next call is going out on August 1, and I hope more people give it a try, or at least give it a listen.
Audio Flux is hosting a virtual listening session with the Circuit 05 finalists on Wednesday, June 18. If you’re interested, sign up here.
